


Right There

by Naomida



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Political Alliances, Post-World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, The Syndicate - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-06-20 02:39:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 25,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15524253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naomida/pseuds/Naomida
Summary: “My name is Beve Perenolde and I am here to propose an alliance.”And even before her sentence was over, Varian was on his feet, down the stairs and holding his blade to Beve’s neck, a dangerous sneer on the face.or: how Beve Perenolde, Syndicate leader and sworn enemy of the Alliance, is forced to turn to King Varian Wrynn for help





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who's back at it again, writing stories about NPCs no one cares about?  
> ;)

Beve tiptoed into the Keep despite the fact that in the two weeks she had been staying in Stormwind, no one had batted an eyelash at her. People didn’t know her face, and only very few knew her name, and she couldn’t help but frown while passing a guard who ignored her and wonder how different things could have been. She would have slept between those very walls instead of a shady inn in the dwarven district, received polite greetings and bows while passing people by in the hallways, and not one pair of eyes would have passed over her unseeingly.

 _Or maybe you wouldn’t be here at all_ , she thought as she arrived in the busy throne room. After all, coming to Stormwind had been a last resort. She had been so certain, for so long, that stepping foot into the Alliance capital would get her killed on sight, she had almost been disappointed when the weary and tired guard had looked down at her forged papers attesting that she was, in fact, a member of the Alliance, and just wished her a happy stay in Stormwind and told her to keep moving.

She should have trusted her intel – that the war in Pandaria had taken its toll on everyone and it was far from over as long as Garrosh was alive, that she would be safer here than anywhere else she called home, that she might even get a shot at succeeding – although that last point was still not certain at all. She should have probably come here at least three months earlier, and she should have already engaged contact with His Majesty Varian Wrynn in the two weeks she had already been here, but it seemed like Beve wasn’t in a very productive mood recently.

Hadn’t been since the massacre.

It wasn’t totally her fault though, because as she craned her neck to look over the crowd at the throne at the very far end of the room and the scary man sitting on it, she couldn’t help but feel intimidated.

Varian Wrynn was a very charismatic man. No one could step into the same room as him and not look, and his large shoulders and absolute mane of a hair only added to that.

She had heard the same stories as everyone else about him, despite living so far away from any Alliance camp with reliable intel. She knew who he was and what he was capable of.

She also knew he was a man of honor, and it was her biggest worry, because honor wasn’t something tied to her name at all.

If anyone in this city were to kill her on sight, it would be him.

She could only hope he would hear her out first.

The crowd moved and she watched as a woman dressed in ratty clothes practically threw herself at the stairs leading to the throne and started speaking with agitation while Varian sat up straighter.

He was looking straight at the woman, frowning and nodding along to whatever she was saying, and it took Beve by surprise that he would care so much about what one of his subject had to say. Maybe it was acting on his part, but she doubted that, especially when she managed to get slightly closer to the thrown and could take a better look at him.

Varian got up when the woman did, and he gave her a nod and a sympathetic smile that pulled at the scars on his face, and Beve thought that he was handsome, in a very rugged from battle way.

Her plan was a stupid one, she knew that, but it seemed to get stupider and stupider the more people stepped in front of their king to petition to him and exited the room, leaving fewer and fewer people there, until it was only Beve and a skinny man who kept on stuttering as he addressed Varian.

The stutter gave her another five minutes to prepare herself, but as the skinny man left the room and she stepped in front of Varian Wrynn himself in full armor, she couldn’t help but feel as if nothing could have ever prepared her to have those gray-blue eyes on her and his full attention.

“I’m listening,”, he said when she just blinked at him without even bowing.

 _You’ve done a lot worse than this_ , she thought to give herself courage.

“Your Majesty,” she started, tilting her chin up, back straight and shoulders back, like she had been taught. “My name is Beve Perenolde and I am here to propose an alliance.”

And even before her sentence was over, Varian was on his feet, down the stairs and holding his blade to Beve’s neck, a dangerous sneer on the face.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a second, as she watched the rage and fear burn in his eyes, she thought for sure that he would decapitate her with just a swift movement of the wrist.

“This is not a very funny joke,” said Varian.

Beve could only agree to that. It was the second blade at her throat in as many weeks, and it had already been unpleasant the first time.

“How did you get into my city?”

“Forged papers declaring that I’m from Dalaran,” she admitted, keeping her eyes trained on his and not the very big sword resting against a very fragile part of her body. “In your guard’s defense, it was a very good forgery.”

“I bet,” he replied, not looking like he found it funny. “What do you want?”

“Your help.”

He snorted at that, although it looked far from amused.

“That’s bold of you. Didn’t it occur to you that you would be killed as soon as anyone knew your identity?”

“It did, but I’m desperate enough.”

That had him narrow his eyes and Beve took it as a sign that she might have a chance.

“My people are dying, being killed by their own ruler, and I felt that as a ruler yourself, you would understand my need to protect my people.”

“How is that any of my problem if you rogue scums kill each other?”

“I thought you’d like to know that my brother is using the plague to wipe us out. Plague that he stole from the Horde.”

He frowned harder than he had up until now but didn’t move nor say anything.

“All I’m asking,” she said since it was obvious he was waiting for her to say more, “is that you let my people be safe in Stormwind, or any Alliance controlled territory of your choice.”

“And what do I get in exchange?”

“A bride of royal blood to give you another heir.”

He raised an eyebrow, as if asking where she would get that bride, and Beve only held his gaze, until he chuckled.

“ _Right_. All you want is for me to make you queen. Do you really think I’m this stupid?”

“I think you could use another heir since you almost lost the one you have, and it seems like–” she stopped speaking when his blade suddenly pressed harder against her throat, drawing some blood, and she blinked against the sting, forcing herself to keep her chin up and not look away from him.

“Don’t you dare talk about my son,” he gritted. “You have _no idea_ about what did or did not happen.”

For a second, as she watched the rage and fear burn in his eyes, she thought for sure that he would decapitate her with just a swift movement of the wrist – she knew he was physically capable of it since his arm wasn’t even shaking from holding the huge sword up.

“You’ll get my men,” she murmured, feeling more blood run down her throat into her collar, the blade making it hard to speak any louder. “You’ll get me, my men, and everything we managed to save. All the priceless artifacts and books. All of our knowledge, our combat strategies, everything.”

“Or I could kill you, wait for your brother to kill all of your men, then get killed by the forsaken.”

“I believe you wouldn’t let innocent civilians get killed.” She had other arguments, had practiced them in her head everyday for the past two weeks, but between the hard expression on his face and the blade at her throat, it was a little hard to think and come up with something.

He shrugged a shoulder – the one that wasn’t attached to the arm holding the sword, thankfully.

“You must know how I feel about rogues.”

“But you never managed to wipe us out like you did with the Defias,” she replied.

She regretted the words instantly, because they were stupid, and it really wasn’t how she wanted him to see her, but instead of making him roll her eyes and explain to her all the ways the Defias and the Syndicate were different, he just huffed a small laugh and finally lowered his blade.

“Someone call a healer,” he said to the room at large without looking away from her. “I’ll let you live for now. I’m curious as to how your brother managed to steal that plague.”

  


  


***

  


  


Beve had thought that being forced to flee from her home after a failed murder attempt on her brother had been her lowest, but she was proven wrong by Varian Wrynn. A man in priest robes had arrived and Varian, along with the priest, three guards and herself, had left the throne room behind for a small yet comfortable looking living room, where the priest had promptly healed the cut on throat before asking her to take her shirt off so he could heal her other wounds.

Varian’s gaze had been sharp on her but she had pretended that she couldn’t see it. The wound was three weeks old but the only healer she had managed to find hadn’t been one at all, just some woman who knew a thing or two about druidism, and while she had managed to stop the bleeding and had more or less fixed Beve’s funny ribs, the job had been butchered. She couldn’t even sit upright without excruciating pain shooting through her right side, but it hadn’t been on her priority list – running for your life and trying to save your people tended to do that.

Now though, faced with an actual healer and his expectant look, she felt ashamed and vulnerable.

She looked down at her knees as she started working on the buttons of her shirt. All of her clothes had been burned at the same time as the rest of her things, and she had only managed to find a pair of leather pants and a white shirt to wear. Had her sister still been alive, she would have mocked her for dressing like that to meet to High King of the Alliance.

The priest hissed as soon as her shirt was open, and she kept it on as he gently started probing at the huge purple bruise going from her armpit to her hip.

“What happened?” he asked softly.

“An arcane explosion.”

“Like the one that destroyed Stromgarde three weeks ago?” asked Varian, and Beve met his eyes without meaning to.

“The one I created, yes.”

His facial expression didn’t change but he crossed his arms as the priest started softly chanting prayers, Light appearing in his palms and warming Beve’s bruised skin.

“It didn’t kill my brother, unfortunately, but it did wound him pretty badly and killed his right hand man.”

“Some of my men died too.”

“It was me or them, and I had to try to kill my brother when I had the opportunity.”

His eyes drifted down to the priest’s hands on her hip instead of him replying, and Beve got back to looking at her lap, mentally repeating to herself that she was doing this for the good of her people – to make sure no one else would die, and all those that had been lost would get avenged.

“Why would you do it in Stromgarde? Why would your brother get so far into contested territory?”

And wasn’t that the question? Beve had been expecting it, knew that there were some things she’d have to reveal about all that had happened, before Aliden had turned crazy, all that she had helped him with. Varian wasn’t going to like it, but she had nothing to lose except her life, and if she was lucky her honesty would _at least_ earn his respect, if not his trust.

“There are things you’re not aware of — that the Syndicate made sure you wouldn’t be aware of,” she said, still looking down at her legs, the warmth from the priest against her side becoming hotter and hotter.

“I’m listening.”

“We retook the totality of Alterac a long time ago,” she said, one of their best kept secret, for the leader of their mortal enemy to hear. “We even had time to rebuild it and expand. In fact, we retook most of the mountains, and more. Stromgarde was still contested, but we were clearly at an advantage.”

“This is not possible. I have spies, people that report that kind of information to me.”

“We took control of all of your spies’ routes shortly after the Cataclysm. It’s been at least two years since you’ve received any information that we didn’t want you to hear. We were ruthless. We killed most of your spies, made sure that the one surviving were only giving you reports that didn’t reveal too much about the situation.” She looked up and met his eyes. “You’re probably wondering why none of your spies ever went missing in action, or at least not when coming back from the Arathi Highlands, that’s because those spies were actually ours. We used simple but powerful magic to swap appearances, sent our men with fake reports, they kept the charade running until being assigned another mission, and came back home to Alterac.”

A muscle jumped in Varian’s jaw and Beve was pretty sure that had they been alone, he would have hit something — potentially her.

“Since the Cataclysm,” he repeated after a moment between gritted teeth.

“Yes,” she replied, “that’s when things started changing for us, when we finally started to— ow!” she yelled, a sudden burning sensation right where the priest was touching her, and she realized her mistake when she met the man’s eyes and the pure hatred in them.

“You despicable traitors,” he murmured, the burning sensation intensifying, making Beve whine in pain as she grabbed his wrists and tried to make him let go, to no avail.

“Don’t make me kill you,” she replied on the same tone — because the pain was too much and she was pretty sure she would scream again if she tried to speak at a normal volume.

“There will be no need,” said Varian, and suddenly his sword was at the priest’s throat, like it had been at Beve’s only a few moments before. “I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt since we’ve known each other for so long,” he said, looking at the priest, “but know that I’ll kill you if you don’t stop this immediately.”

“I’d rather die than serve a king who accepts those rats into his city.”

“As you wish.”

Beve tried not to flinch, she really did, but some blood splashed her as the priest’s body heavily feel on the ground and she couldn’t look away from Varian’s cold gray eyes as he looked down at her, bloodied sword in hand.

“Are your spies still here?” he asked, and she blinked, lost for a second.

“No,” she said, feeling a lot like she was eighteen again and facing off Alliance soldiers that had come to destroy her home. “Everyone was called back. Aliden needed all the soldiers he could get.”

Varian gave a nod at that, squatted down to wipe his blade on the priest’s robes before he was straightening up and sheathing his weapon.

“Get dressed, you’ll see a proper healer later.”

She nodded at that and focused on buttoning her shirt, trying to ignore the tremble in her fingers, especially after all the deaths she had witnessed those past few months.


	3. Chapter 3

Beve couldn’t have imagined how crazy that day would be. Varian was unexpected, and slightly crazy she was starting to fear.

He took her to the kitchens after asking her three times if she could walk without feeling too much pain — and she had lied and said yes before following him.

A dwarf woman was currently putting down bread and cheese and different kinds of wine on the out-of-the-way table they were seated at, and Beve was so surprised about everything that had happened to her since Varian’s blade had gotten away from her throat, she didn’t even realize that he was sitting next to her on the small bench instead of in front of her, so he could at least keep an eye on her.

Varian gave a small nod to the dwarf woman once she had set everything down, and she nodded back before quickly walking away, leaving them alone in their little corner of the kitchens, where no one could see or hear them.

 _P_ _erfect place to stab someone_ , she thought, before grabbing a piece of bread and pulling the cheese closer.

“Red?” asked Varian, already pouring some wine.

Beve nodded, mostly because she would drink whatever he would hand her — wouldn’t even check if it was poisoned or not because, to be frank, she hadn’t had anything to eat in the past three days, and she had a feeling alcohol would soothe the burn in her side and the shaking in her limbs.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said after she had eaten almost half of her bread and drank two third of her glass in one sip. He sounded soft, and his eyes were a lot warmer than they had previously been when she met them, but Beve couldn’t be sure this wasn’t the wine messing with her. “I never thought he would attack you like that.”

She shrugged a shoulder and accepted the piece of Dalaran swiss he handed her. “It’s not like it’s your fault.”

“Still. This is no way to treat a…” he only hesitated for a fraction of second, but Beve caught it, “guest of mine.”

 _I’m a prisoner,_ she thought, biting into the cheese instead of saying it out loud.

It was good, and if it wasn’t for her royal upbringing, she would have moaned. She had learned a long time ago that Princess or not, food was food, and that was probably why so many of their people had followed Aliden despite his actions. The Perenolde royalty knew what hunger meant, how pain and suffering felt, had given as much as their people in the war.

“Will I be sleeping in the stockades tonight?” she asked, looking down at the piece of cheese she was cutting.

 _He shouldn’t let me handle a knife, that could get him killed_.

“You should,” he replied, looking at the knife she was holding when she looked up at him in surprise, “but I guess I’m feeling generous. There will be guards thought, a lot of them.”

“I understand,” she replied.

“I’m only doing that because you didn’t kill the priest when he attacked you.”

“What makes you think that I would be capable of killing him?”

“You might not realize it, but I’ve heard a lot about you,” he replied, taking a sip of wine – and now that was most definitely the wine in Beve’s blood talking, because she could have sworn that he was smiling.

“I thought it would reflect badly on me, as your _guest_.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, before taking another sip, and handed her a piece of cheese.

  


  


***

  


  


Beve wished she wasn’t still wearing the bloodied shirt and dirty leather pants the next day, as she stood in front of King Varian Wrynn’s counselors, but a bed and another meal had been the only things offered to her that morning, and she knew that it was already too much. Light knew this wasn’t how the Syndicate had treated their prisoners.

“This is unacceptable!” loudly announced one of the people around the table that Beve didn’t even know but had decided she didn’t like the second he hit the table with his fist to mark his point. “She should be hang at midday, like all the traitors usually are.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Varian, immediately reclaiming everyone’s attention. “She’s provided me with valuable intel in the twelve hours she’s been in the Keep.”

Everyone turned to a man that Varian had saluted as Matthias at the beginning of the meeting, who gave a small nod.

“I already sent my men in Stromgarde to scout the region, it’s all true.”

“It doesn’t matter,” replied another man, one that no one had talked to or about since the beginning of this meeting, but Beve hadn’t needed a single clue to guess who it was – she had actually met him, a very long time ago. “We cannot trust a single Alteraci. Not now, not ever. They’re traitors, they hate the Alliance about as much as they hate everyone else that isn’t a part of their rogue organization, and all the good intel in the world will never change that fact.”

“Funny of you to say that,” she replied with a smirk, and as one man all the people in the room turned to look at her. Varian had told her that she could speak if she wanted to and that it wouldn’t be well-received, and she had done her best to keep quiet up until now, but hearing those words was just too much. “Tell me again, _Your Majesty_ , who built up a wall around their kingdom to keep everything out, including the Alliance?” Genn Greymane frowned at that and opened his mouth to speak again, but she didn’t let him, striding closer to the table instead and putting her hands flat on it, looking the king right in the eyes. “My father did something terrible, betrayed everything Alterac stood for, but it was _his_ decision and I’ve had to live with it ever since and carry the weight of what he’s done although I was only a child at the time. You, on the other hand, were the brain behind this decision. And it wasn’t the only unfortunate one you made,” she added with an even bigger smirk, which had him grit his teeth. “Now, I understand if all the Alliance Marshals and Stormwind Nobles refuse to let me in, but _you_ , of _all people_ should keep quiet on this issue, because all I’ve ever done was try to rebuild what someone else had destroyed, unlike you.”

The silence at the end of her speech resonated for about ten seconds, until everyone in the room except maybe Varian and Genn started screaming – at her or each other, she wasn’t really sure – and a guard escorted her out before she could grasp more of what was happening.

It was only thirty minutes later when Varian stepped into the bedroom she had been given as a cell, and he closed the door behind him before leaning against it, hands behind his back.

He sighed as their eyes met, and Beve swallowed with difficulty.

“They voted to have you executed,” he announced. “I vetoed it, of course, but I thought you should know that your little speech to Genn, while greatly appreciated by some of the Nobles, really didn’t save you.”

“I knew this would happen,” she replied, “but I still had to try. I’ve never done anything to these people.”

“Do you know how many people, before the Cataclysm, deflected the Syndicate and tried to join the Alliance?”

She looked away from him. “A lot, I’m guessing.”

“Yes, and a lot of them had a lot to say about you. Mostly about your burning desire to kill your father and do something better with the Syndicate.”

Biting the inside of her lip, Beve forced herself not to think about it – to regret not doing it when she had the chance, because then maybe Aliden wouldn’t have lost it like he had, maybe then she could have done one thing right for her family.

“I don’t trust you, but I do trust your intention. Maybe it’s stupid and naive of me, but I do believe that you want to save your people from your brother and the Plague and whatever else you have been doing. I’m still not sure about the whole marriage thing,” he said, which made her chuckle and look back at him to discover what looked very close to a smile on his lips, “but as long as I’m in charge, you’ll be safe between those walls.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He nodded.

“I still don’t think you’ll give me an heir.”

“I’m not as old as you look,” she replied without even thinking, but he chuckled instead of killing her, so she guessed she could maybe relax just a little in his presence.


	4. Chapter 4

“I am not sending my people to die of hunger in the Westfall Pit!” loudly said Beve, glaring at the man facing her. He was probably regretting sitting right across from her at the table, but it was too late for him to switch places, and Beve didn’t feel like she could glare at Varian like she really wanted to.

“Just Westfall,” replied someone, “there’s no Pit in the name”.

Beve turned her glare to the woman who had just spoken, feeling arcane magic sizzling in the pit of her stomach.

In the two weeks she had spent in the Keep, negotiating the terms of her stay, nothing had changed for her people back in the Arathi Highlands, and she knew that every lost minute could mean a lot of deaths.

More than she could take.

They needed to come to a compromise quickly if they didn’t want to have no one left alive to relocate – or maybe that was their strategy, to waste time until everyone was dead, but Beve wasn’t about to let them do this.

“Just because we’re desperate doesn’t mean that we will accept terrible conditions of life. Just don’t put us in the only place filled to the brim with beggars.”

“Why, you don’t like beggars now, although it’s what you are?” asked one of the Marshals around the table, looking down at her with a sneer.

“It’s already going to be difficult to be accepted wherever we go, but if, on top of that, you put us somewhere people fight for every scraps of food, we’re going to get killed.”

“I’m not letting you set up camp in the Elwynn Forest,” said Varian, before the Marshal could reply, “and that’s the last time I’m reminding you of it.”

“Redridge then,” she said, crossing her arms and leveling a hard glance at him.

He obviously hadn’t wanted her to say that, she could tell from the way he suddenly looked like he had bitten into a lemon and wasn’t trying to show it.

“I heard dragons and orcs attacked and there’s nothing left on the Eastern side of the region.”

“Funny how many things you heard, living so far away from Stormwind,” he replied, this time frowning freely.

She raised an eyebrow as her only answer to that.

“Everyone out,” said Varian, still looking right at her.

He didn’t have to say it twice, and Beve knew without having to be told that the order wasn’t for her.

Once they were alone in the room, him at the head of the table, Beve three chairs down to his right, Varian sighed heavily and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Just take what we’re offering. You’re in no position to negotiate, you have virtually nothing to offer the Alliance except a bunch of spies and some farmers, which we’re not in need of, by the way, and no one wants to see you, neither here or in Westfall.”

“I’d rather take my chances in the wild than have my people thrown in the middle of all those that Stormwind didn’t want anymore and left to die of hunger or sunburn.”

“We’re not letting anyone die,” he replied between gritted teeth, sitting up straighter and slightly leaning against the table, so he could be closer to her to glare. “You should be grateful that we’re even letting you in.”

She felt her blood start to boil in her veins. “Oh yes,” she said, dripping with sarcasm, “thank you _so much_ for letting me chatter away at a bunch of men who all want the privilege of putting my head on a stick while my people are running for their lives and counting on me to actually _do something_ and save them. Thanks a lot, I almost forgot how much I owe you for not murdering me on sight.”

Varian hit the table with his right fist, making it shake violently as Beve jumped, and he leveled murderous eyes at her.

“Don’t you dare forget who you’re speaking to, you stupid–”

“Father?” asked a soft voice, immediately shutting him up as both Varian and Beve turned to the door, where a blond young man was standing, a confused expression on the face.

In a second, Varian was on his feet and walking toward who had to be Anduin Wrynn, and Beve looked away the second they hugged, the tightness in her chess making it hard to breathe.

“I didn’t know you would come back so early,” said Varian against his son’s shoulder.

“I was getting homesick,” replied the prince with a smile as they stepped away from each other.

Beve looked back at them and met Anduin’s surprised smile.

“Hello,” he said, “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“And I don’t think you should,” replied Varian, already opening the door again and looking expectantly at Beve.

She got the message loud and clear and quickly got up and left the room, taking care of never looking at them.

  


  


***

  


  


“Does anyone know who you are?” asked Beve, looking up at the man who had stepped in front of her in the Keep’s gardens.

“The Greymanes sure do,” he replied with a smile, “may I sit?”

“Of course, and if they do it means that Greymane is even more of a hypocrite than I thought.”

“He is,” sighed Isiden.

The last person Beve had thought she would meet in Stormwind was her cousin, but the Alliance capital was a strange place and her cousin was an even stranger man, so really, she could have guessed it would happen at some point.

“So, running away to Gilneas didn’t turn out so great for you.”

“That, it didn’t, but at least I’m not where you are standing right now. I’d hate to have to bargain for my life and the life of my people like that.”

“You would have preferred to see us all burn and loot our still fuming corpses, I know, but I guess none of us got what we wanted in the end, right?”

“No, we didn’t.”

They sat in silence for a while, Beve with her eyes lost in the distance, unseeing to all the people also out in the Gardens on such a beautiful day. She wasn’t really used to the humid heat of Stormwind and would have preferred to be about anywhere but here, but at least outside the guards and other rogues following her everywhere kept their distance.

“Rumor has it that you asked the King to marry you.”

“You know I never ask. I’m a real successor to the throne, unlike you.”

Isiden snorted haughtily at that.

“I don’t think you’ll ever see that throne, considering Aliden and all of his children.”

“They’re all dead,” she replied, voice softer than she intended, and she couldn’t help but meet the surprised glance sharply sent her way.

“Who killed them?” asked Isiden, looking as breathless as Beve felt.

“I keep on telling you all that he’s gone mad and it’s like no one listen.”

“Aliden would have never killed his children!”

“And yet...”

“But why? Why would he murder them? He has nothing to gain from this.”

“But he had everything to lose from them siding with me, which they tried to do.”

Isiden looked away, sorrow passing over his features, and Beve wondered for a moment how genuine the feeling really was.

Isiden had grown up at the Alterac court, with Aliden, herself, her brother Emile and Isiden’s sister Isadora. She’d never forget watching Alliance soldiers murder Isadora just to make an example of her, the betrayal she had felt when news had reached her ears that Isiden was in Gilneas, pushing the Alliance leaders of the time to make him the new king of Alterac. It had felt a lot like being cut in two by a burning hot blade, and while she had had to push it to the back of her mind because she’d had a lot of more important things to think about, she had never forgotten and had made the promise to herself that she would one day avenge all of her people that he had abandoned for a chance of ruling.

It’d have to wait, though. There was still too much in the balance – in fact, there’d never had so much in the balance before – and if she played her cards right, he could even prove himself useful while she was here.

Too bad all she wanted was to blast him with arcane and call it a day.

“I know you like me probably about as much as I appreciate you,” he said, taking her out of her thought, not looking at her but down at his hands, “but for what it’s worth, I’m sorry for your loss.”

Beve’s heart skipped a beat – she had forgotten that he knew her secret, that his sister had been there that fateful day, that she had admitted to telling him before getting taken by the soldiers.

“I haven’t lost anything as long as I keep fighting,” she replied before getting up, feeling the rogues hidden nearby do the same, and starting to walk back to the Keep, the weight on her shoulders suddenly feeling heavier.


	5. Chapter 5

The next morning saw its new dose of humiliation for Beve in the form of a formal breakfast with King Varian and Prince Anduin.

She had been given a light blue dress for the occasion that really didn’t look good on her – because the color made her look overly tanned or because the dress was two sizes two big, she hadn’t yet decided – but it was still better than the dirty clothes she had arrived in and at least the dress was a better reflection of her actual status of Princess.

The prince and king were already at the table, eating, when two guards dropped her off in the right room, and she chose to nod instead of bowing, before taking the third chair around the round table, her plate already filled with fruits and nuts.

She grabbed a peach first, because those had been her favorite but already hard to get by when she was growing up, and she probably hadn’t had one since she had left Lordaeron at eighteen.

“It is nice meeting you, Your Highness,” said Anduin, breaking the awkward silence floating in the room and forcing Beve to put the peach down and look at him, “my father hadn’t mentioned you in his last letter to me, otherwise I wouldn’t have been as impolite as I was.”

“You’re too kind,” she replied, “and it’s nice meeting you too.”

He seemed surprise when she didn’t add anything but simply smiled instead of trying talk again, and Beve went back to her fruits pretending she couldn’t feel Varian glaring daggers at the side of her face.

It wasn’t like after making him laugh once or twice she had thought that he would have been nicer to her, but considering his history and the fact that she was doing what she was doing to save her people, she would have thought that he would at least be _polite_ about his hatred of her – but maybe he was more like her than she had thought, not embarrassing himself with politeness and etiquette when being direct and slightly rude got the point across faster.

If that was the case, she got his point loud and clear.

He hadn’t wanted her here before, but now that Anduin was back in Stormwind after his trip to wherever he had gone after Pandaria, it felt like he couldn’t wait to get her out of his kingdom as fast as possible. He was scared, there was no doubt about it, but Beve didn’t know nor understand of what he could be so scared of. Surely he _had_ to know that she wouldn’t hurt his son, of all people, not when she needed his help so much – not while she was making demands left and right, although she knew that she had no right to.

“To be truthful with you,” she said when no one else said anything even after she had finished her peach, “I didn’t know that you were here either.”

“I came back a little early from the Exodar as a surprise for my father, I knew it would make him happy.”

“How thoughtful,” she said, smiling and actually meaning it.

He had blue eyes and his hair was too light to look anything alike the Perenolde’s infamous dark blond, but he reminded her of some of her nephews – Aldren, in particular. They both had this energy that pulled you in, made you feel like they cared deeply about you and what you had to say to them, and watching Anduin, Beve could tell that he was the kind of person to make everyone smile just by being here, like Aldren was – or had been.

She sharply looked back down at her plate, feeling hot tears burning at the back of her eyelids, and she blinked several times, hoping to make them disappear.

One got stuck to her eyelashes instead and she watched as the tear fell down on the porcelain, right between two strawberries.

“What’s happening,” gruffly said Varian, sounding more like an order than a question, and Beve cleared her throat and quickly got up, turning her back to the table, not wanting them to see her like that.

“I’m not feeling well,” she lied, before crossing the room to the door and leaving without another word.

  


  


***

  


  


“ _I’m not leaving without you!” yelled Aldren, grabbing her forearm and stopping her from grabbing the book she was reaching for._

_Beve didn’t even pause, she just calmly grabbed his hand, made him let go of her, grabbed her book and put it in the bag at her feet._

“ _I’m serious. I don’t care what you think is best for me, you’re not facing all of them off by yourself.”_

“ _Yes I am, and before you start screaming about injustice, know that you have an important part to play too,” she said, grabbing another book, looking at its spine, and putting back, pretending she couldn’t hear him huff like the teenager that he was, arms crossed and everything. “I need you to get Elysa to safety, this is one of our top priority for now, and there’s no one I trust more than you to do it.”_

_He huffed again, took the next book she had grabbed right out of her hand, let it fall to the ground and took her in his arms before she could protest._

_All words died on Beve’s tongue when he tucked his face between her shoulder and neck, and she closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around him, a sudden flashback of her holding him like that when he was only four years old taking her by the guts, making the knot in her chest even tighter as Aldren started shaking slightly._

“ _I’m just scared for you, okay,” he murmured. “We both know that if Lord Falconcrest gets his hands on you...”_

“ _I know,” she whispered back, planting a quick kiss to the crown of his head and running fingers through his too long hair. “I know, but I don’t have a choice, and neither do you. We’re the last sane Perenoldes, and we have to do what we must to save Alterac.”_

“ _Just don’t die please,” he had murmured back, squeezing her tighter._

If Beve had known then that it was her last time with him before Aliden killed every single one of his children, she would have said so many other things – and she wouldn’t have let go of him. She would probably still be holding him, if it meant that he was still alive.

A knock on her door brought her back to the present moment and she told the person to come in, expecting a servant to bring her diner since she hadn’t gotten out of her bedroom to eat it instead of Varian – who was, actually, holding food.

“Not hungry?” he asked as he put the tray in his hands down on the bare desk on the other side of the room.

“Not in the mood,” she replied, watching as he took the chair that had come with the desk, turned it around and sat down on it, “for food, or for conversation.”

“Funny,” he replied, his big arms crossed across his chest more menacing than anything else, “I thought that as soon to be engaged we should actually discuss a lot of things.”

That got Beve to immediately perk up and sit straighter and taller on the edge of her bed, something choking and unfamiliar rising from her chest to her throat, choking her a little – she thought it might be hope, but she could be wrong, she wasn’t familiar with it.

“You’re really considering it?”

“You would already be dead if I wasn’t,” he replied. “Not that I don’t think it’s not the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard, or the most ridiculous, but you did bring up an interesting point.”

She waited for him to continue although it killed her to do so, but the disappointment in his eyes when she didn’t ask was worth it.

“I do need a bride of royal blood. That’s the only way anyone, including myself, would accept my remarrying.”

She was unfamiliar with Stormwind’s internal politics but it sounded sketchy.

“Alright,” she still said, because after all, this was exactly what she wanted, the ultimate protection for her people: a new home.

“We’ll have to thoroughly discuss terms, of course, and it’ll take some talking to get the other nobles to agree to this, but I think it could work.”

“Alright,” she said again, not really believing what she was hearing.

“Good. I’ll leave you to your diner then,” he said with a small nod, before getting up, taking a moment to just look at her as she looked up and met his eyes, before leaving as quickly as he has arrived.

Beve couldn’t help but smile once she was alone.


	6. Chapter 6

To kill her brother, Beve had simply teleported to Stromgarde Keep and sent a volley of arcane at him. It had been easy with the intel provided by Elysa, who had even told her exactly where Aliden would be standing — and the craziest part was that she had been absolutely right. Her brother would say that it was because he was a man of class but Beve just thought that he was simply a boring creature of habit.

And so she had almost killed him, and would have succeeded had Lord Falconcrest not grabbed her by the neck with one hand, holding a blade to her throat with the other, and pushed her back against a wall hard enough that she was disoriented for a few seconds.

She had felt the dagger against her tight throat, vision blacking out because of the lack of air, had heard several screams, the loudest of which was from her brother, and she had closed her eyes and taken a decision: to gather up as much arcane energy as she could, and blow the whole place down.

She still didn’t even know who, precisely, had gotten her out of there. She wasn’t supposed to have any allies, after all, it _had_ been a suicide mission, but somehow, she had woken up thirty minutes later in the Hinterlands to the news that it had all been a set up — that Elysa and all the other innocents who didn’t want any part in this atrocity were dead.

Aldren was, too, and she couldn’t help the tears that had escaped her. She had only given herself a minute to mourn, though, before declaring that they were still moving forward with their plan and demanding a mana potion, so she could get herself to Stormwind.

It all seemed like it had happened a long time ago instead of just three weeks and a half prior though, now that she was standing on a literal pedestal while half a dozen of seamstresses and other hair dressers were buzzing all around her.

“We need to do something to the hair,” said one of the two high elf in the room.

His female counterpart nodded, staring at Beve’s hair with a pensive expression, one eyebrow cocked.

Beve couldn’t help but look at them from the corner of her eyes, used to having anyone not human as an enemy – and focusing on two people was better than trying to keep a look on absolutely everyone around her, especially since it was starting to make her skin itch with contained arcane.

“The curls are staying,” said the female elf after another minute of silence.

“Of course,” replied the male. “The color, too. Their family is known for that dark blond.”

“Gorgeous.”

“Yes.”

“And dangerous,” she added, meeting Beve’s eyes with a smirk. “Could probably kill us right now,” she said in Thalassian.

“Probably wants to,” nodded the male in the same language, looking Beve in the eyes too.

Beve bit her tongue and glared until they looked away giggling. Those two elves might have been old enough to know about her – to have actually seen her before, back when she was in Lordaeron, maybe. It was strange, especially since no one in Stormwind so far had seemed to know anything about her except the fact the Syndicate were bad people who had once worked with the orcs and therefor betrayed the Alliance.

It was a good thing. She actually _wanted_ people to underestimate her. To think that she was a powerless woman with no choice but to relay on the big powerful men of the Alliance to save her. They didn’t need to know that she was the single most powerful member of the Syndicate, feared even by her father when he was still alive.

They didn’t know to know that she had already survived through the worst possible things life could have thrown her way, and that she would do it all over again if she had to.

She sighed when someone grabbed her arm and held it up to take measurements, and told herself once again that it was for the good of her people.

  


  


***

  


  


“We need to be honest with each other if we’re about to do this,” said Varian later that afternoon.

He was sitting behind a huge wooden desk. The chair he was on was huge too, and made out of blue velvet, and there was a huge pile of parchments pushed to the left side of the desk.

Everything about it screamed High King of the Alliance. The hearth was big enough that Beve could probably step in it, and the walls were covered in books. She didn’t know whether he had summoned her to his office to impress and scare her or because it was one of the only place where the guards didn’t enter.

“I agree,” she replied, crossing her legs and putting her hands on it, hoping that he would start first because whatever he had to say, it couldn’t be as bad as the things she would reveal.

“I have a member of your family in the Stockades,” he said, looking straight into her eyes.

Beve immediately sat up straighter, observing him with wide eyes, trying to decipher whether he was lying or not.

“May I know who?”

“Not yet,” he replied, and Beve pressed her lips together, annoyance surging through her.

“Alright,” she said, steeling herself. “My turn then: I’m the one who stole the Plague in the first place.”

Varian frowned at that, and Beve watched him clench his fists on the chair’s armrest.

“Why?”

“As leverage,” she replied, looking down at his chin because she couldn’t bare the weight of his eyes, not while she was telling him this. “I took it about two days after Gilneas fell. Stealing a gas mask was pretty easy, and teleporting the plague away was child’s game. The Forsaken still tried to go after us, but it didn’t take them long to realize that the we had leveled the playing field and they couldn’t win, not without losing too many soldiers first, and so they left us mostly alone to do as we pleased and expand.”

“And then your brother got greedy.”

“He got greedy, and started using it again, against our own people. Every time someone disagreed with him, he showed how potent it could be. Showed us all that he had found a way to recreate it.”

“But what happened, really, that made you come here?”

“Do you know how many siblings we were?” she asked.

“Six,” he said.

“And we’re down to two, now. He didn’t even take the time to kill our last brother himself, just sent Lord Falconcrest, his right hand man, do it. And then he killed his children.”

She looked up at Varian’s eyes again, and found him calm, listening and waiting, and she decided that she might as well tell him the whole truth.

“His mistress was pregnant. My nephew was supposed to escort her and most of the citizens still in Alterac to a safer place, but my brother must have heard about it, because while I was trying to murder him, his men were killing everyone.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and she quickly blinked the tears in her eyes away, not about to cry in front of him _again_.

“The people who were with me, they’re on the run, hiding in several safe locations, but I don’t know how long they’ll be able to.”

“Do you know where they are, exactly?”

“In the Hinterlands, mostly.”

“So it would be harder for your brother’s forces to bypass the dwarves there,” he said thoughtfully, nodding, “that’s smart.”

“We can pass off as lost Gilneans as long as people don’t come too close to us, so we decided to make the best out of it.”

“How many people would that be?”

Her throat closed up at this, because she could still picture the hundreds of eyes that had looked up to her as she had promised her people that she would take them away from her brother, that she would protect them no matter what, that she was here for them. Hundreds of people, that had all died terribly.

“About sixty people are left,” she said, voice tight, looking down at her hands.

“I see,” he murmured.

There were more people, technically, she knew that. People who had been too scared to join her but agreed to what she had to say. People who hadn’t heard her message yet, or who had heard it too late. People who had seen the massacre and decided that enough was enough and Aliden needed to be stopped.

The problem was the she didn’t know who those people were, how many of them there was. She didn’t know how to get to them, how to get them to her, and the more time she spent away from Alterac, the lesser chance she had to make them follow her. Aliden had probably announced to everybody that she had died in the explosion – after all, she _should_ have – and people might be thinking that all hope of overthrowing him had died that day too.

“You’re getting mages and a small party of soldiers,” he added after a long moment, making her look up at him again.

“Excuse me?”

“After it’s official, when you’re going there to get your people back, you’ll have mages and soldiers with you. Mounts too, and weapons. We can’t let a mad man play with such potent weapons and treat civilians like this.”

Beve nodded, hope blooming in her chest, and something light and soft, something a lot like relief. “Thank you,” she said, a little breathless.

Varian only gave her a small nod to that.


	7. Chapter 7

Beve had only loved once before, back when she had been the heir of a respectable kingdom, studying magic in Lordaeron like so many other teenagers of royal blood. It had been a very long time ago, and she tended not to think about it very often, but as she slowly walked across the Keep’s gardens with Varian Wrynn at her side, her official fiancé as of that morning, she couldn’t help but compare the two men.

Her ex-lover had been about an inch smaller than Varian, and less wide at the shoulders, but he had been a warrior too, before starting his paladin training. He’d had chocolate brown hair, when Varian had jet black hair, so much longer than her lover’s.

Both were men of honor, though, and both had looked at her with something a lot like interest in their eyes – for her power, for what she knew, for her name, she couldn’t really point a finger at what it had been, _exactly_.

“We should stop here for a moment,” said Varian when they passed under a tree and stepped into its shade.

The day  was  exceptionally hot, and while Beve was very unused to these temperature, she couldn’t help but feel bad for the king who was wearing his armor. At least the dresses the seamstresses had provided were all appropriate for the weather.

Her lover had smiled a lot, while all Varian was providing her was some intense squinting and frowning. He didn’t laugh nor smile or joke, and she wondered if he had always been like that or if the rumors were true – that his wife had died, and then the black dragons had taken a hold of him, and he hadn’t been the same ever since.

It was almost funny that they had never actually met up until then. Beve was certain that she had seen him one time in Lordaeron, from far away while he was training with Arthas, but they had never been properly introduced. She had thought that she would get married to someone mildly important, probably some prince from Arathi or Gilneas, or at least a duke. Not the sole heir of a destroyed kingdom — and how ironic that it was now the only kingdom left standing.

He had done that. Had rebuild his kingdom from its still fuming ashes, had grown it, until it was the last human kingdom standing. Until he was leading one of the strongest army forces of the world.

Until he was such a pinnacle of hope and miracle, even someone like Beve would come to him for help in the darkest times.

“How are you getting acclimated to Stormwind?” he asked, taking her out of her thoughts, and she squinted up at him, the sun glinting on his armor hurting her eyes a little.

“I’m doing better than I thought I would,” she replied, “despite the atrocious weather.”

That brought the tiniest of smile on the corner of his mouth, and he looked away to glance at all the other people in the gardens standing under a tree like them.

“From what I remember, the weather isn’t that great up north either.”

Beve shrugged a shoulder and felt a smile pull at her lips too. “It’s actually okay in the spring and summer. The winters are harsh, I will not lie about it, but at least it never gets this hot.”

“That’s one of the perks of living so close to a volcano,” he said, before bracing himself with a sigh and stepping back out of the shade and into the sunlight.

Beve didn’t move for a second, watching him walk as everyone in a thirty meters radius gazed at him, and wondered what life as his wife would bring.

She was pretty sure it wouldn’t be easy nor peaceful.

  


  


***

  


  


“Let’s be clear that you will never touch the throne,” said Varian that evening.

He was sitting on one end of the couch in his office this time, with Beve on the other end and a huge parchment in between them.

Beve nodded. “I don’t want it,” she said, “I already have one.”

Varian nodded curtly and started writing on the parchment in fancy curvy letters that she would have never guessed were produced by his hand.

_1\. Beve is to never sit on the throne_

“My people get proper housing and a chance at a normal life, once they arrive.”

He nodded and wrote it down too.

“Anything else?”

“I’ll only give you one heir.”

He snorted at that but wrote it down too, underlining the “one” twice.

“You’ll sleep in your own wing of the Keep,” he said, waiting for Beve to nod before he wrote it on the parchment.

“I’m not getting involved with anything that has to do with Stormwind’s affairs.”

“Agreed.”

“I _will_ be named queen of Alterac.”

His feather stopped for a second, before he finished writing the sentence and looked up at her, frowning slightly.

“Why is it so important to you? You’ll technically be queen of Stormwind.”

“Because it’s my home, and this crown should have been mine a long time ago,” she replied, curling her fingers until her nails were biting into her palms.

Killing her brother and taking the title would be the best revenge she could have on her father. It would be even more delicious that killing him would have been, but it wasn’t like she could tell Varian why that was – she’d have to reveal her single most biggest secret, and there was no way she would trust him with that.

No way she would trust anyone, actually. Isiden and Aliden were the last two persons alive to know about it, and only because she hadn’t had a choice in it.

His father had taken absolutely everything from her, and getting the crown back was the only way she could take some of it back – the rest was gone forever.

Varian was still frowning though, so she decided to let him in on some of it.

“In Alterac, the first child is supposed to be the successor, no matter their gender, unless they are judged unfit to rule. As you know, I am the oldest, but my father wanted to punish me and announced Aliden as his successor.”

“Punish you from what?”

Beve bit on the inside of her lip, because wasn’t that the most important question?

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I want the title, even if it means absolutely nothing.”

He still frowned at her for a moment, unmoving, his eyes running over her face like he was trying to read right through her lie and find the truth underneath it. Too bad for him, Beve had been keeping this particular secret for over two decades now and wasn’t about to spill it, and maybe that was what he found, because after a while he simply nodded and wrote down on the parchment _Beve is to be named Queen of Alterac_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't hesitate to leave a comment ;)


	8. Chapter 8

Beve pressed her lips together and did her absolute best to keep her face completely neutral despite the heinous look King Greyman was throwing at her from Varian’s right. The other king at the table, who was at the very end of the long table, and sitting to Beve’s right, was either acting like he couldn’t see it or really interested in what ever Anduin, who was sitting right between him and Genn, was saying.

She had never imagined her engagement diner to look like that, but then again she had abandoned all foolish hopes of ever getting married a long time ago.

While Varian had Anduin, and then Genn, Mia Greymane and a various assortment of noblemen and noblewomen, Beve’s side of the table looked pathetic. The seat directly to her left was empty, to represent her family and whatever else was custom here in Stormwind, and the rest of the noblemen and noblewomen who had come here for Varian were seated, careful not to look too much at her directly – like that would make her attack them.

She had asked for a walk in the mountains surrounding Stormwind before that diner, to honor Alterac’s traditions, and Varian had dismissed his guards and walked with her in silent for over two hours, always staying a few feet behind her and never saying anything when she stopped from time to time, closed her eyes and just felt the warm sun and the cool breeze on her face.

There would be no snow in this wedding, and it was bothering her maybe a little too much, but she refused to talk to anyone about it – especially since she had no one to talk to.

She kept telling herself that she could power through all of it, especially now that she had a clear goal in mind, with Varian having told her that they would go rescue her people three days after this stupid diner, but it seemed that now that she was staying in a warm castle with absolutely no danger in sight except some zealous guard, it was becoming harder to keep her emotions in check.

Her mind kept going back to all the people she had lost those past few months.

To Aldren, she was a little ashamed to say.

Not that the others weren’t important, consciously she knew that, but she hadn’t thought that she would ever lose him. She had never thought that Aliden would do this to her, knowing how much Aldren meant to her.

But maybe it was easier to think about one death instead of the several dozens ones that she still couldn’t wrap her mind around. Maybe, if she focused on Aldren, she would not think about her siblings, about her neighbors, about all the people she had lived with through the darkest times and who had all been there for her, until the very end.

Maybe, this way, she could tell herself that they hadn’t died because of her.

And damn it, she knew it wasn’t her fault. She had never forced Aliden to kill anyone, had never pushed him down that dark path, but if all those people hadn’t followed her then maybe…

If she hadn’t stolen that plague then maybe…

If she had seized power a long time ago, when she should have, then maybe…

She jumped out of her thoughts when something gently brushed against her forearm, and she blinked down at Varian’s fingers, seeing them pressing against her wrist, not understanding for a second.

Her brain thankfully reconnected and she looked up at his eyes, surprised to see his brows furrowed and what almost looked like a worried crease on his forehead.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, tone barely loud enough that she could hear him over the loud sound of everyone else in the giant dining room.

She moved her arm out of his reach and looked away instead of replying, feeling Anduin’s eyes fall on her too.

“Beve?” asked the prince, and she closed her eyes.

Aldren had been maybe five or six years older than Anduin. The prince of Stormwind already showed traces of adulthood, the same traces she had seen on Aldren’s face back when he had been sixteen and already fighting with them all on the battlefield, against Horde, and Alliance, and Ravenhold, and ogres.

Anduin looked as smart as she knew Aldren to be – _to have been_.

She couldn’t even look at the prince without feeling a terrible chasm open up in her chest, swallowing her down until she was left completely empty, nothing but a fake smile and a smart mouth to reclaim things she had no right asking for.

That feeling would never go away, she was certain of that.

“Beve,” said Varian this time, his hand going for her wrist again and lightly squeezing it – a warning or a comforting gesture, she wasn’t sure.

“You know I won’t be okay until my brother is dead,” she found the strength to say, voice barely shaking as she turned her head to look at him again.

Anduin and Varian exchanged a very quick look before Varian was focusing back on her, squeezing her wrist a second time.

“Give us time,” he said, something sounding a lot like a promise in his voice, and Beve nodded, waiting for him to let go of her wrist, but he didn’t.

  


  


***

  


  


_This is it_ , she thought as she stepped into the royal bedroom, the guard that had accompanied her here staying outside with a mean sneer.

The engagement party was still going strong in the ballroom, and while Beve had just been standing against a wall, glaring at anyone who so much as glanced in her direction, she would have rather stayed there than come here because Varian had summoned her.

She was pretty sure they weren’t supposed to get on with the heir-making before the official wedding, but then again, who knew with him.

The bedroom had an entryway – because of course it would. She had guessed that Stormwind would be even worse than Lordaeron had been when she was living there, used to the harsh living in Alterac with minimal decorating and frill. She remembered all the nobles there glaring at her simple clothes, designed to keep her warm during the freezing winters rather than make her look pretty, and considering that she had survived ever since, despite the rebuilding of Alterac and their military success, luxury was still foreign and strange to her, and she stood there for a second, looking up at the cream ceiling, feet digging into the plush carpeting and trying not to look at the paintings on the walls or the expensive vase to her left.

“Come in,” called Varian’s voice from the other side of the room, so Beve took two steps, enough to get out of the entryway, and immediately stopped on her track, staring at the giant bed to her right with parted lips.

It could probably fit four people. It was large enough that she could lay down on it horizontally and never touch the ends. She had never seen anything quite like that. For once, Varian, who was sitting at the foot of the bed, looked small, compared to it.

He had small glasses on his nose and was frowning down at a parchment, a small pile of them sitting right next to him on the bed, and he gestured to the couch on the right side of the room without even looking up.

It was strange, but she went to sit on it, keeping her eyes firmly turned to her now fiancé – and wasn’t that a strange concept, that Varian Wrynn would marry Beve Perenolde, of all the people he could have chosen. She still wasn’t sure, exactly, what he had to gain from it, but it was to her advantage and she wasn’t about to tell him off, quite the contrary.

“I thought you’d like a break from the party as much as me,” he said after a long while, having gotten a quill from somewhere on the bed and furiously scribbling down on the parchment, still frowning. “You can take a book from the shelves, I’m probably going to be here for a while.”

She stayed silent, continuing to observe him, wondering what was his play here. They weren’t as hostile to each other as they had been when she had walked up to him in his throne, but they weren’t friends yet, or anything close to that that could explain why he was being _nice_ to her – or at least considerate.

It probably was pity, she realized when he raised his eyes to look at her over his glasses before pointing to the shelves covering the half of the room opposite her with his chin, and she pursed her lips as she slowly got up and walked to them, eyes scanning the books without reading or seeing anything.

She could probably spin it in her favor, if he really pitied her enough to be nice. It would be a blow to her pride, but her being here in the same room as him while their _engagement party_ was still going on was already the biggest blow she could have taken, and after all those hours spent arguing against different marshals and nobles to get her people to safety, there wasn’t a lot she wouldn’t do.

“Thank you,” she said, keeping her back to him, still not looking at the books in front of her – knowing that turning her back to her enemy was a risk, but taking it anyway because she couldn’t mutter those words while showing him her face, not now, and probably not ever.

He grunted instead of replying verbally and Beve grabbed the first book within reach and went back to the couch, opening it on her lap, staring unseeingly at the first page, and kept all of her attention turned to Varian Wrynn, who was still frowning and rewriting something on his bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As of Thursday the 25th of Octobre this story is finished. I'll try to post a chapter about once every couple of days.


	9. Chapter 9

“I won’t let you out of my sight,” warned Mathias Shaw, and Beve didn’t even dignified it with an eye roll, putting her cloak on instead.

She was getting more and more nervous with every tick of the big clock on the wall in front of her, and she hadn’t been able to sleep at all that night, too nervous to do more than stare up at the ceiling of her cell and bite down on her lower lip.

Today was the day.

She had a weird feeling about it, and she had already been through too much not to trust her gut feeling, but she couldn’t tell yet if this one was a good or a bad one, and it was making her even more anxious than she already was, but if anything bad happened, she could potentially lose everyone, and she couldn’t take that – wouldn’t survive losing the last Alteraci still fighting for anything other than death and decay.

Varian strode into the room like the king he was, looking regal with his cloak flying behind him, sword in its sheath in his hand, and his eyes immediately fell on Beve.

He gave her a curt nod, to which she replied with her own nod, before she was looking down to put her gloves on.

They had been going over the plan for the past two days. Only six of them would go, including Beve and Mathias Shaw, two mages and two soldiers, to reduce their risk of getting seen. They’d join Beve’s people, and the mages would portal everyone back to Stormwind, where Varian and way too many guards would wait for them.

It wasn’t a bad plan – in fact it was probably the best they could have come up with – but Beve was the only one to truly know the landscape, and she knew that too many things weren’t up to them. She didn’t know if patrols would be there, she didn’t know if her people were still at the rendez-vous point, she didn’t know if her brother hadn’t already gotten everyone.

“If everyone’s ready,” said Varian, cutting right through the soft chatter that had filled the room.

Beve flexed her fingers, keeping her eyes down to her hands while two mages that wouldn’t go with them stepped to the middle of the room and started casting a portal.

She could have done that, she thought. She could have teleported everyone directly at their target location, but no one trusted her to do so, although saving her people was the _only_ reason she was here to begin with, but with the stress building up in her stomach she hadn’t wanted to fight for that, preferring to keep her energy in case everything went wrong.

Varian stepped in front of her while Mathias Shaw was starting to bark orders, reminding to everyone what their role was.

“Good luck,” he said, softly enough that she was the only one to hear, and she looked up into his blue eyes in time to see him smirk slightly. “I thought you might need something,” he added, taking a half step closer to her and pressing something cold into her left hand.

Beve didn’t look down to see what it was, already intimately familiar with the feeling of a dagger’s hilt in her palm.

She frowned.

Varian’s cloak was hiding them enough that no one could see that he had just slipped her a weapon, and he was close enough that she could have taken a chance at stabbing him right between the plates of his armor. It was a stupid move on his part, something he should have never done, not with an enemy of her stature, and she couldn’t help but wonder what it meant – because she knew that Varian Wrynn wasn’t stupid.

She silently slipped the dagger in her belt, against her kidneys, away from prying eyes, keeping her gaze straight into Varian’s.

“Why?” she asked when he didn’t move once it was done.

“Marriages should be built on the knowledge that no one will be stabbed.”

“I’m not making any promises,” she replied, watching his smirk grow larger as he stepped away from her and turned to watch Mathias and the mages, his back to her.

She could have easily grabbed the dagger and stabbed him in the neck, right this instant. No one would have been able to stop her. She would have probably died in the following ten seconds, but Varian would have been dead before her, and she took a long steadying breath in, reminding herself that her old ways didn’t work here, in Stomrwind.

That the harsh living of Alterac was behind her now – at least until she could deal with her brother.

Mathias Shaw turned to face her and she met his eyes with her head held high, keeping her face completely blank – praying that the churning in her stomach couldn’t be seen.

“After you,” he said, gesturing at the portal with one hand while the other stayed on the hilt of one of his daggers.

Beve looked at the portal, at the vague traces of green trees and gray sky she could see on the wavy surface, and she didn’t look at anything else as she crossed the room, feeling every eyes on her, and crossed it, feeling weightless for a second, before she was stumbling on lush grass and someone was pushing her away from the portal.

She didn’t even turn to glare at Mathias Shaw, eyes turned to the forest all around them as she heard the four other people on this mission with them arrive before the portal was closed.

Going by foot or horse had been one of the biggest debate, and the only thing Mathias Shaw and Beve had agreed on. Walking would be longer, but ultimately safer, and she was glad Varian had accepted this condition as she heard something move in the trees all around the small clearing they had chosen to arrive.

“Let’s go,” she said, the strange feeling in her stomach growing as she watched several birds fly away from the trees.


	10. Chapter 10

Beve had to admit that no matter how annoying Mathias Shaw was, he was good at his job.

He was the only one of their group to make absolutely no noise while he walked – just like Beve, who had spent her entire life in those parts of the world trying not to be seen. His eyes were two burning points on the back of her neck, because for some reason he refused to walk anywhere but right behind her, but at least he wasn’t saying anything, unlike the two soldiers who kept cursing under their breaths every time something mildly annoying happened.

Beve just grit her teeth when they had to walk through bushes of brambles and kept going. They stayed near trees and big rocks, as out of sight as they could, and the cave where her people were waiting for her was growing closer and closer.

After two hours of walking, she was almost shaking with how nervous and scared she was, but she told herself that no matter what she would find there, it would be better than being in the dark about the fate of her people.

She stopped next to a huge tree, and turned to the rest of her party, gesturing with her head to the small cave a few meters away from them. There was no place to hide to get to this cave, and it was partly why they had chosen it – so they would see their enemies arrive.

“I’ll go first,” she whispered, “Shaw and a mage can go after me, then the rest.”

Everyone nodded, although no one looked happy about it, and Beve straightened up and lost no time stepping out of their hiding place under the trees to get to the cave, heart beating painfully hard against her chest.

She walked fast, knowing that Shaw and one of the mages were just behind her and she only had seconds to appease her people before those two would make everything worse, but nothing could have prepared her to what she found right inside the cave.

“Hello,” smiled Darbel Montrose.

“What are you doing here?” asked Beve as Mathias Shaw and the mage stepped into the cave too.

“I’ve got good news,” replied the warlock standing by herself in the middle of the cave, smiling wilder as she grabbed Beve by the arm with one hand and reached inside a pocket of her robe with the other.

Beve tried to say something, like warn Shaw that this wasn’t her plan since the beginning, but the weightless feeling that engulfed her took her breath away, and by the time she could breath normally again, she was standing in the middle of a small library, looking at two women instead of one.

“Elysa...” she murmured, blinking at the pregnant woman standing in front of her.

Elysa engulfed her into a tight hug instead of saying anything, and Beve closed her eyes and hugged her back, feeling tears start to form in her throat and sting their way up to the back of her eyes.

“I thought you were dead,” she murmured against Elysa’s shoulder, voice wavering because if Elysa had survived then maybe…

Maybe all hope wasn’t lost.

Maybe Aldren was still alive too.

“Your friend saved us all,” she replied against Beve’s hair, fingers curling into her cloak. “He came before your brother’s army could get to us, created mirrors image of every single one of us and took us here.”

Beve sent a quick thank to the Light and whatever else had gotten Enu and her to meet – and a quick thank to herself for having saved him all this time ago, when her still sane brother had wanted to have him executed.

“Aldren is alive, Beve,” murmured Elysa then, and Beve buried her face against her shoulders, not wanting anyone to see the tears of pure _relief_ and bliss running down her cheeks.

“Thank the Light,” she whispered, squeezing Elysa tighter.

  


  


***

  


  


Ten minutes later, after Elysa had filled her in on what had happened, how Enu had gotten everyone here to Dabyrie's Farmstead where Darbel, whom Beve had thought up until now was a fervent follower of her brother, had accepted to hide everyone.

“What about you?” asked Elysa as they stepped out of the library into the rest of Darbel’s home, “Did your plan work?”

“Plan B did,” she said, smiling slightly – one of her first real smile in a long time – at Elysa’s surprised face. “We’re all going to Stormwind.”

“I’m not,” replied Darbel, and she gave a sad smile when Beve stopped and turned to look at her. “Your brother still doesn’t suspect a thing, and he needs me too much to do anything if he was to ever hear about it. I need to stay here and help the best way I can.”

Beve nodded, because it made sense and she wasn’t sure what would happen to Darbel if she went with them anyway – after all, even Beve wasn’t sure if the warlock could be trusted, not after everything that had happened with her and the Burning Legion’s followers who used to be her leaders.

“We need to get back to that cave as soon as possible though, before they start thinking that this was a trap all along and we lose our only chance at survival,” she said, starting to walk again.

When she stepped out of the house, her breath got stuck in her chest for a second at the familiar sight that greeted her.

There were her people, working in the farm, taking care of horses and sparring with the few weapons they had, the familiar air of Arathi, still chilled from the barely gone winter, and away in the distance, the outline of a familiar mountain, where she had grown up, and that she would rule once everything was over.

“People!” called Darbel, and Beve watched with pride as everyone turned to look at her and immediately rushed to join them, big smiles on their faces and excitement in their eyes.

“You all know by now that our only way to survive is to leave for a while,” she said, trying to meet every pair of eyes, looking for one in particular. “I struck a deal with King Varian Wrynn, who has accepted to grant us some land while we need to stay there. I know this isn’t ideal, but this is the only thing we have, and you all know that I would never do anything to harm any of you.”

Pride flared brighter than before in her chest as she saw her people nod at this, start to scatter to get their stuff and the rest of their family somewhere else on the farm’s ground, and she turned back to Elysa and Darbel.

“How are we going to transport everyone back to the cave?”

“It would be easier to get Stormwind’s people here,” said Darbel.

“I know, but I don’t trust them enough for that.”

Darbel nodded at that, looking pleased, and took a small blue orb out of her pocket, handing it over to Beve.

“Activate it to go back there and make a portal, it should be fairly easy for someone like you.”

Beve snorted, grabbed the orb and did just that.

  


  


***

  


  


Mathias Shaw grabbed her by the neck, slammed her against the cave’s wall hard enough to make her teeth clatter, a dangerous sneer on his face as he pressed a dagger right under her chin, and she almost laughed at the irony. The last time she had been in this exact position, she had completely destroyed Stromguard and had ended up here, in this very cave.

“What the fuck,” he gritted between his teeth, and Beve decided to relax in his grip and meet his eyes.

“Don’t forget that I’m your future queen,” she warned with a mean smirk, the giddy feeling in her stomach making her feel like she was invincible.

“Don’t forget that if I killed you right now and left your corpse to rot in this cave, no one would come looking for you and no one would ever miss you.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she replied, feeling his dagger pierce her skin, the wound immediately starting to burn. “My people are waiting, they moved to another safe location. I can make a portal, so they can get here and then to Stormwind.”

“Why the fuck should we trust anything that you say.”

“Because you’d already be dead if this is what I wanted,” she replied, blinking when his dagger was pressed harder, feeling blood run down her neck, into her collar.

“Come on,” grumbled one of the soldier, coming behind Shaw and forcing him to get his dagger away from her throat, “let’s do this. King’s orders.”

Mathias kept on glaring at her, fingers squeezing harder around her neck for a second, before he was stepping back and letting go.

“Get to work then,” he said, keeping his bloody dagger in hand.

Normally, Beve would have had a lot to say about this, but her people were more important, so she started casting a portal, pretending like the sting at her throat wasn’t here.


	11. Chapter 11

Beve was standing proud and tall, Varian to her right, as her people flooded the room, entering one after another through the portals, thanking her before they were ushered away to make place for the others.

She still hadn’t seen Aldren, and it was starting to make her nervous again and she had some trouble breathing correctly, but everything had already gone so well that day, she couldn’t keep a satisfied smile from her face.

“That’s a lot more than you told us,” commented Varian.

“I thought they were all dead,” she replied, sending him a quick glance from the corner of her eyes before focusing back on the portals, watching as Elysa stepped in and sent her a blinding smile, one hand cupped under her round belly.

The room was starting to spin a little around her and she wondered if she hadn’t lost more blood than she had thought, although no one had commented her dark red throat, but before she could turn to Varian and tell him that she might need a healer, her eyes caught dark blond hair the exact same shade as hers, and her heart jumped in her chest when Aldren’s eyes fell on her.

She exhaled in relief and didn’t wait for him to join her, stepping away from Varian and meeting him halfway, falling into his open arms and screwing her eyes shut the second he closed his arms around her and she pressed her face against his collarbone, a sob trying to make its way up his throat while she did her best to keep it in.

“I’m so sorry,” murmured Aldren, bent so his forehead was on her shoulder, sounding like he was trying very hard not to cry either, “I’m so sorry you thought I was dead, I really am.”

“Aldren,” she choked, squeezing him tighter, the sob finally getting free, making her shake with all the things she wanted to tell him right now, because she finally knew what it was like to lose him, and there were too many things left unsaid, too many things she owed to him.

Too many regrets she couldn’t live with anymore.

“Aldren,” she repeated, because for some reason his name was the only thing her mouth wanted to say.

“I’m right here,” he replied, one of his hand coming up to cup the back of her head, like she had done with him so many times when he was still a scared child.

She breathed in his scent, something finally settling in her chest, filling in the empty hole that had been drilled there the second she had heard that he was dead, and she sniffed as she took a step away from him, staying close enough that he still hugged her but she could look at his face.

His eyes were red and teary, and there was a yellow bruise still healing on his left cheekbone, but when Beve raised one hand to cup his face, he closed his eyes and leaned into it, and she believed, for the first time since she had decided to do this, that maybe things might actually work out okay for all of them.

She parted her lips to speak and choked again, frowning because there was no sob getting in the way this time, and she watched as Aldren gripped her arms and frowned too, fear suddenly striking his face.

“Beve,” he said, “are you okay?”

She opened her mouth again, realized that she couldn’t talk because she had _no air_ to form words with, and took two panicked steps back, stumbling and almost falling if it weren’t for the pair of strong arms that grabbed her by the shoulders from the back and straightened her.

She looked over her shoulder, met Varian’s eyes and immediately gripped his forearm with one hand, the other going to her throat.

 _I can’t breathe_ , she tried to say, but the two men around her seemed to understand, already yelling for a healer as the room started spinning faster around her and black closed in around her.

  


  


***

  


  


Beve woke up to the infirmary that she had already visited on her very first day in the Keep, after Varian had killed the other healer that had attacked her, had fed her and taken her here to finally get her wounds taken care of.

The only difference was that Aldren was sitting on a chair next to her bed this time, arms crossed and head at a painful looking angle as he slept. His hair had slipped out of his low ponytail and was falling into his face, and Beve ached to reach out and brush it away, like she had done so many times before under the burning gazes of her parents.

She had a lot of things to worry about, like moving everyone safely to Redridge, where everyone had finally agreed to put them, planning for a way to defeat her brother, think about a plan in case Darbel turned out to not be honest, and that was without even thinking about the fact she was to be made queen of Stormwind in only a few weeks, but as she watched Aldren’s chest rise and fall slowly, she couldn’t help but feel like all this could wait until she had done the one thing she had always wanted to.

She didn’t feel ready – or else she would have done it the second her father had died – but in the face of death and the war they were facing, her own feelings seemed insignificant. Just like she had put her pride aside to walk into this keep and tell Varian Wrynn that he was to marry her and accept her people as refugees, she could tell Aldren the truth.

It might crush him, to have been lied to for so long, and he might reject her and never want to see her ever again, but it was a price she was willing to pay if it meant finally being free from the last thing her dead father held over her.

She sat up in the bed she had been laying on, raising a hand to feel the skin of her throat, finding it absolutely back to normal, and took another moment to just stare at Aldren. His hazel eyes were closed, so different from the usual brown that ran in the family. He had her nose though, and his maternal grandmother’s bone structure, with high cheekbones and a cutting jawline.

He was an adult already, and it did strange things to her heart to think that – to think back on the first time she had ever seen him, pink and tiny and squirmy and crying loudly, until she had taken him into her arms and he had finally stopped crying and looked up into her eyes while tears were streaming down her face.

She didn’t like to think about that – about everything that had followed, the guards and her screams and Isadora trying to comfort her when they both knew that nothing could ever make it better.

Aliden had looked sorry, and had apologized to her, on their parents’ behalf, on his wife’s behalf, on the entire world’s behalf.

“Nobody deserves this,” he had told her, holding her hands tightly into his while she sniffed and looked at him through her tears and eyelashes. “We can still fight it.”

She had shaken her head, drained of all energy, longing for something that she knew she could never have, wishing that her lover was there with her instead of somewhere in Lordaeron training.

“Beve,” had murmured Aliden, truly looking sorry and brokenhearted for her, “you know that if I had a choice...”

“I know,” she had replied, squeezing his hands too, because he wasn’t the only one to be forced into doing things that he didn’t want to do.

His wedding had taken place two months before, and Beve hadn’t attended, already knowing that it would make her sicker than she already felt.

Their father hadn’t announced anything already, but Beve could already tell that Aliden would be named the heir in her stead.

She was too broken to care about that.

She came back to the present moment when Aldren grumbled in his sleep and moved a little, and she couldn’t help but wonder where things had gone so wrong that Aliden would lose his ways like that, that he would turn his back on her and everything they both wanted for Alterac.

How the brother who had held her through an entire afternoon that she had spent sobbing could go ahead and try to kill Aldren when he knew exactly that it would destroy her.


	12. Chapter 12

“Mathias admitted to wounding you with a poisonous dagger,” said Varian one second after striding into the infirmary and dramatically letting the door close behind him.

Beve hadn’t even realized that she had fallen asleep until she had woken up alone, about ten minutes before Varian’s arrival. She was disappointed that Aldren wasn’t here, needing to speak to him.

“Where is Aldren?” she asked.

“In the ballroom, with everybody else. They’re all being fed.”

She nodded slowly, sitting up in the bed and meeting Varian’s expectant look as he stayed on the other side of the room.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t know about the poison and had other things to worry about.”

“I saw,” he snorted, making her frown.

She raised her chin up high, because after a day like today, she wasn’t about to let him walk over her.

“What did you see, exactly?”

Something passed over his features, but it was too quick for her to recognize it, and he stepped closer and sat down on the chair, crossing his arms just like Aldren had done.

“I saw that your nephew is the one you care about the most. We talked, and he told me that the two of you have always been close.”

Beve kept her mouth shut, not knowing whether she would try to strangle Varian or tell him everything if she opened it.

“He also told me that if I ever did anything that hurt you, he would personally make me pay.”

She huffed a laugh at this, the tension in the room suddenly dissipating, and she watched as Varian visibly relaxed.

“You did good today. You managed to bring everyone here without a problem, except Mathias but he was dealt with, and everyone in Stormwind now sees that you’ve been telling the truth this whole time. The nobles will not try to kill civilians.”

“You say that, but I still won’t rest easy until everyone is safe and sound in Redridge, away from your army.”

He nodded curtly, looking like this was the last thing he wanted to hear, but Beve was still too happy and light-headed from the poison to care about his feelings and what he did and didn’t want to hear from her. He had been very clear that she was to stay in Stormwind, _in the Keep_ , like a prisoner, until Varian said otherwise, which might never happen, and she had accepted, because as long as her people were safe, she could endure.

At least until Aliden died – nothing could stop her then from sitting on her rightful throne.

“I’m glad you didn’t use that dagger on Shaw when he attacked you.”

Beve snorted haughtily at that, forgetting herself for a second and rolling her eyes.

“He only wounded me because I let him do so. Getting my people here was my priority, if he ever tries that again, you’ll lose your best spy.”

“I doubt he’s still the best spy with all the Alteraci in this keep at the moment,” replied Varian with a smirk and a pointed glance, and she let herself give him a real smile for once as she nodded. “Besides, he saw first hand what you did to Stromgarde, he should know better than to taunt you. Or believe that he could kill you.”

That last sentence surprised her and she felt something in her chest suddenly relax – and it took her a breathless second to realize that it was because someone who wasn’t in the Syndicate was _finally_ acknowledging her strength and power.

Someone was finally seeing _her_. Not for being her father’s daughter or her sister’s brother, but for who she was. For what she was.

A good damn mage who wasn’t afraid to destroy entire castles.

“I won’t forget that you said that,” she said, softly, looking up at him through her eyelashes. “Or that you trusted me enough to bring my people here.”

Varian nodded and got up, clasping her on the shoulder before leaving without a word.

Beve sighed at length before letting herself fall back in the bed and putting her hands on her face, feeling too many good emotions at once and too unused to it to bare.

  


  


***

  


  


“Varian is the only one to know who the baby’s father is,” Beve whispered to Aldren during diner that night.

She was sitting at the very end of the table, Varian on the other side, facing her, and she was glad to be sitting among her own people for once. Aldren was at her left, frowning and listening carefully as he shoveled forkful of mashed potatoes and beef into his mouth, while Rose was to her right, looking as dignified as the old noblewoman had ever looked, wrinkled face completely neutral, shoulders back, back straight, her dark gray hair in a perfect high chignon. She hadn’t said a word so far but Beve knew that she was listening and putting everything away in her mind to use for later.

People had looked at the three of them strangely when they had sat down, probably not expecting Beve’s right hand man and right hand woman to be her own nephew and what appeared to be a harmless old woman, but her strategy had been to let everyone underestimate them and it had worked perfectly so far.

“It should stay that way,” commented Aldren between two bites, pausing just long enough to speak and take a sip of wine before her was tearing through his plate again.

“By the Light,” muttered Rose, glaring for a second, “where are your manners? We’re sitting at a table of nobles, don’t eat like some common peasant.”

Aldren rolled his eyes but still put less potato on his fork.

“They already think so little of us,” continued Rose though, her eyes looking straight down at her plate, her tone just loud enough that the two Perenoldes could hear it, “those stupid idiots, thinking themselves so above us when we’re the ones who never bent the knee, who survived all these years by ourselves, fighting on four fronts at the same time, fighting against their _own army_ and–”

“Rose that’s enough,” cut Beve.

Rose, thankfully, listened and pursed her lips.

Beve had known, that asking everyone to follow her this deep into enemy’s territory had been a lot – too much for some, who had preferred to stay with Aliden – but she couldn’t let Rose, one of the three people here that she trusted with her plans, to talk this badly about the people welcoming them all into their home – the people that would decided whether or not they lived, whether or not Alterac could have its revenge against Aliden.

Plus, she was engaged to Varian Wrynn, and she was pretty sure a normal bride would never let anyone speak as such about her future husband – not that she was a normal bride and this was a normal wedding.

“The most important thing right now is that we’re all here, together, and we’ll leave tomorrow morning for Redridge.”

“You’ll stay here though, right?” asked Aldren, and Beve turned back to him, feeling a smile pulling at her lips despite herself.

She still couldn’t believe he was alive.

“Yes, and so will the two of you. I can’t stay alone anymore, not now that they all see me as more powerful. I’ll also need you at negotiations.”

“I can’t imagine how it was,” said Rose, still looking down at her plate, “you against all of these pigs.”

“It’s not just that,” she replied, eyes drifting off to the other side of the long table for a second. “I need you two to keep an eye on Isiden.”

They both stopped eating and followed her gaze, Rose letting her fork clatter against her plate in her surprise and gathering some looks.

“What is he doing here?” she asked between gritted teeth, ignoring the weird looks sent her way and looking straight into Beve’s eyes.

“I guess he stayed with the Greymanes even when their Kingdom was attacked.”

“Something he didn’t have the decency to do with his own home,” she snorted, glaring at Isiden’s profile just for a second before she was focusing back on Beve. “Please, tell me you’ll kill him.”

“I will,” she calmly replied, “when the time is right. For now, I just need you two to keep an eye on him, and please Aldren stay as far away from him as possible. I know he’s going to try and talk to you, but he’s not to be trusted.”

Aldren nodded, wiping the corner of his mouth before sliding his hand over the table to gently squeezed Beve’s forearm, making her feel just a little better.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I know what he’s done. I’m not speaking to him.”

Beve nodded, put her hand on his and squeezed it too, before they all went back to eating, Beve feeling the burning eyes of Varian on her face even from the other side of the table.


	13. Chapter 13

_Things had started falling apart the moment Elena, Aliden’s wife, had died. It had been a Ravenhold assassin who had gotten lucky with a thrown dagger, and she had suffered for about two hours while everyone tried to find the right antivenom, before finally sighing her last breath, leaving Alterac in shambles._

_If you had asked her before the events, Beve wouldn’t have believed that things would deteriorate so quickly all because of the death of one woman, yet there she was._

_She had never liked Elena, had met her during the most terrible time of her life and the woman had been forced to steal the most important thing from her, which had only bred hate at first sight – hate that hadn’t dissipated through the years, although Beve had to admit that the woman’s death had pained her. They had both grown to respect each other despite everything, and surviving together through the years had inevitably made them closer than they would have otherwise been comfortable being._

_Unfortunately, Aliden didn’t seem to care about any of that anymore, because the first thing he did when seeing Beve after his wife had died was to clasp her on the shoulder, heave a sigh of relieve and ask for a portal to Stromgarde._

_Beve frowned._

“ _It’s too dangerous for you to go there,” she said, trying to be logical and not yell at his face what she was really thinking about him. “Elena was just_ murdered _. I can’t allow you.”_

“ _I need to see him,” replied Aliden, looking concerned as he put his other hand on her shoulder and slightly leaned down to be at eye level with her, staring deep into her eyes. “You must understand. I’m sure all you want right now is to ride to Strahnbrad to see Aldren.”_

_It was true, but she wasn’t about to admit it and shouldered his hands away instead, glaring daggers at him._

“ _He just lost his mother,” she hissed, and her brother scoffed at that, taking a step back and throwing his hand up in the air. “All of your children did, you must stay here, close to them.”_

“Please _,” he said, “we both know what you thought of Elena your whole life. We both know what_ she _thought of Aldren. She couldn’t wait to get rid of him, I’m not sure he’ll feel the loss as much as your nephews and nieces.”_

_Beve gritted her teeth._

_When that didn’t work she closed her eyes, curled her fingers until her nails were biting into her palms, and took small breaths, telling herself that attacking her brother right now would only reflect badly on her._

“ _Listen,” said Aliden after a moment, voice suddenly soft, and Beve opened her eyes when she felt him grab her hands. He actually looked_ sorry _. “We’re finally free of him, Beve. Elena was the last piece of this mess of lies we have been forced into. Now that she’s dead, father doesn’t have any reach on us,_ nothing _.”_

“ _You’re forgetting Aldren,” she whispered, feeling the truth of his words at the back of her throat, too hot and choking, making her feel like she was going to cry at any second._

“ _Aldren is almost an adult now. He can take it, he can hear the truth.”_

_Beve shook her head, looking away, the usual uncomfortable weight pressing down on her chest every time she thought about it._

_She couldn’t be sure that Aldren would understand, that he would_ forgive _her for not saying anything before, letting him believe that he was hated by Elena, his_ mother _._

_Aliden gently squeezed her hands and caught her eyes. “I swear on my life that he won’t hold it against you. Trust me on this one, and let me go see my lover.”_

“ _You’re not seeing Falconcrest,” she replied, stepping back and letting go of his hand, the small moment between them gone just like that. “Our people are scared and since you’re their king, apparently, you’re going to go out there and reassure them that the death of your wife is a tragedy that we will survive and avenge. You’re going to tell them that we’re resilient enough to get over it, and you’re going to tell them that we’re already planning retaliation, and once it’s done you’ll meet me back at the war table. I’m going to go grab our siblings while you’re doing this, we should all be back here at the same time.”_

_Aliden sighed deeply and rubbed a hand down his face, suddenly looking tired and older than he was._

“ _Some days, I really wonder why I don’t abdicate in your favor,” he sighed._

_Beve rolled her eyes, grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him toward the door, gently pushing. “Go,” she said, “before I actually consider it.”_

“ _Alright,” he called over his shoulder as he left the room, “but think about what I just said!”_

_She nodded although he couldn’t see her, and couldn’t help but ponder over his words for a second, wondering…_

No _, she firmly told herself. Elena had just died, people were panicking and they had almost lost Stromgarde only two days before. She didn’t have time for her stupid emotions._

_She had a kingdom to quietly manage from the shadows and a brother to save from himself._

  


  


***

  


  


Beve stayed silent when Varian stepped next to her in the shade of a pillar and stared in the same direction as her, to where Aldren and Anduin were both sitting on the grass of the keep’s garden, a book open between them while they talked animatedly.

“His mother died about a week before the Cataclysm,” she said after a while, voice soft, not really wanting for him to hear her but needing to tell someone who wasn’t Alteraci, who hadn’t been there that day.

Varian just hummed.

“We almost lost everything that week. Stromgarde, Strahnbrad, my brother Aiden...”

“Your brother was named Aiden?” he asked, turning to her with a frown.

She spared him a quick glance and the beginning of a smirk.

“Our father loved him dearly. He was the youngest. Brave, with a kind heart. He deserved better than a life of exile and war that ended with betrayal at the hand of his own King.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

She turned back to Varian, facing him like that very first, with her chin up high and the burden of everyone she knew and cared about counting on her to save them.

“Because you helped me, and you gave me that dagger.”

“You needed a way to defend yourself in case something went wrong.”

“And we both know that I don’t need any weapon to do so,” she replied, almost smiling when he did, looking like she had just had him and there was nothing he could say or do about it.

“Fine. I guess I don’t need to explain what this dagger represents.”

“No you don’t,” she replied, keeping her eyes firmly anchored to his, “but I just want to make sure that you understand that this is a two way street. I don’t have any daggers to offer, but I did gave you all my secrets, and the fate of my people is between your hands.”

“Are you saying that you want me to open up to you?”

Beve shrugged a shoulder, suddenly feeling very stupid, shame as unfamiliar as it was burning crawling its way up from her stomach.

“I’m saying that I’m willing to play nice, _for now_.”

He smirked bigger than before and took a step closer to her, and she had to force herself not to step back into the pillar, although he was close enough that his hair would touch her jaw every time the wind played with it.

“Listen very carefully, woman. I’ve been willing to play nice up until now, because while you can’t be trusted, I also had no reason to believe that you would be foolish enough to attack me or anyone here in Stormwind, but if the arrival of your people is suddenly giving you the courage you lacked until now to make a move, know that I will be very happy to get rid of you at the very first wrong move. The very first misinterpreted look.” He leaned down, closer, closer, close enough that she felt his breath on the bridge of hher nose and was forced to look down at his mouth so she didn’t go cross-eyed. “If you so much as breathe wrong, I’ll happily detach your head from your body, so don’t test me. Not now.”

He made to leaned back but went still the second the words left Beve’s mouth without her really thinking about them. “Now that your son is back and welcoming us with open arms?”

She had expected to feel his fingers around her throat, like everyone seemed fond of doing, or the sword at his back to suddenly be in her face like that very first time, but instead he stepped up into her space, until she was forced to step back into the pillar, literally stuck between it and his chest – a rock and a hard place, she couldn’t help but bitterly think.

And then she realized there was something cold and sharp pressing against her stomach, something that would very easily stab right through the soft silk of her dress and into her organs.

“Do not test me,” he whispered, face even closer than before, and she looked up into his eyes this time, their blue almost gray in the sunshine. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

“Please,” she smirked, “do kill me.” She gently took hold of his shoulders, feeling him press the blade and his entire body harder against her, only making her smirk grow bigger. “Kill me, and discover how the Syndicate prevailed for so long. How a bunch of nobles and some farmers not only resisted against both the Horde and Alliance army, but also _won_ against them.” He was glaring hard enough that she could feel the heat on her face, but that didn’t stop her. “Kill me, and discover what loyalty means, and what desperate people are willing to do once you leave them no other choice but to burn everything to the ground and salt the ground.”

“One word from me and they’re all dead. Every single last one of them.”

“And one spell from me, and you are. So is your son, by the way. You saw what happened to Stromgarde, didn’t you?” She cocked her head to the side, the gesture both intimate and unfamiliar because of the absence of space between them, and now that she had slightly changed the angle of her head, she could feel their breath tangle as they both breathed at the same time – in sync in the adrenaline rushing through their veins.

Varian’s eyes darted down to her mouth for just a second, but it was enough for her to know that she had won this time.

“That’ll be my only warning,” he still grunted before pushing himself away from her, the dagger already concealed when he stepped away, in the direction of Anduin, his steps assured and his body still strung with tension, from shoulders to his tight fists.

Beve stayed against the pillar, watching him go, and strange light feeling in the pit of her stomach that made her victory taste a lot better.

Maybe she could win, after all.


	14. Chapter 14

“I worry about you,” said Aldren that afternoon when Beve came back to the Keep from having spent the entire morning in Redridge, overseeing construction of their brand new village.

Beve sent a quick look over her shoulder at the two guards following her, but they seemed unbothered enough so she just lowered her tone.

“About what?”

“What happened yesterday in the garden. I know you enough to know that you weren’t kissing the king right there in front of everyone. Was he threatening you?”

“Yes he was, but I threatened him right back and I’m pretty sure he’s the one who has the most to lose here.”

Aldren grabbed her by the arm and stopped her right in the middle of the hallway, looking down at her with worry, biting on the corner of his lower lip.

“You’d tell me if I really needed to worry, right?”

The uncertainty in his voice twisted something in her stomach but she still nodded, knowing full well that this wasn’t true – that unless the situation was dire enough to require that she put him in danger, she wouldn’t do it, not ever again.

“Please,” he murmured, gently squeezing her arm, “don’t lie to me. I can help.”

“I know,” she said, putting her hand on his, “but there’s no helping me out of this. I’ll marry him, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Why did he threaten you?”

Because Beve had naively thought that they were finally getting somewhere – not that she was about to tell Aldren that. He’d ask questions, and she was uncomfortable answering. She hadn’t gathered the courage to _really_ talk to him yet, and each time she thought about it she felt like she was getting sick and thinking back on Aliden’s words from several years ago had only made things worse.

None of this would have happened if she had been just a little more courageous.

“Beve,” repeated Aldren, scowling, “why did he do it?”

“Does it really matter?” she replied, trying to shoulder her way out of his grip, but he didn’t relent, insisting on meeting her gaze instead.

“Of course it does,” he said, those pale hazel eyes like a blade in her heart every time she let her guard down and stared at them for too long.

It was ridiculous, how long some pains would linger. How, over two decades later, a single event in her life could still dictate what she said and did and the way she acted. How one pair of eyes could make her ache so profoundly, in parts of her that she was pretty sure were more her soul than her body.

 _This boy will be the death of you_ , had warned her father, a very long time ago, and he might have been right.

“Let go of me Aldren,” she said instead of replying, instead of finally telling him the truth, instead of doing literally anything else, and she could see the hurt and disappointment flash in his eyes as he complied and took a step back.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, looking away in shame, and she sighed softly.

“Don’t apologize, I understand that you’re worried, but I assure you that there’s no serious reason to be. I’ve managed all by myself against him up until now, I’ll manage now that I have you and Rose by my side.”

“You’re about to marry him, I don’t see how I can stop worrying, especially if he’s _violent_.”

She smirked at that and patted Aldren on the chest. “You know that no one touch me unless I let them, Aldren. Now go befriend Anduin Wrynn instead of pestering me, you’re too old for that.”

He huffed but relaxed a little and even managed a small, lopsided smile.

“Anduin Wrynn sure is more fun than you.”

“That’s not very hard though,” she replied, smiling when that made him laugh. “Go now, and let me handle my own marriage. I promise to call you when I finally go kick Varian Wrynn’s ass.”

“Good,” he said, quickly kissing her on the forehead, “I wouldn’t want to miss that.”

She rolled her eyes but let him gently hold her arm and walk her to her bedroom-slash-cell.

  


  


***

  


  


Beve had been in enough war councils in her life to know that it was better than whatever it was she was doing now.

“And of course,” said the petite human who had been talking without a pause for over twenty minutes now, putting several pieces of parchment down on the table Beve and Varian were sitting at, “we need to choose the paper and lettering for the invitations. I know you don’t have a date yet but it was my understanding that you wanted to get married soon.”

“As soon as possible,” said Beve, keeping her eyes on the wedding planner’s smile when she felt Varian look at her at that sentence.

They hadn’t so much as looked at each other since what had happened in the garden, and she wondered if maybe it wasn’t better like this.

They’d get married, make that heir as soon as possible and Beve would leave to get on with killing her brother and retaking what was hers. It was a sound plan, one that didn’t involve staying in this city longer than was strictly needed, and she was positive everyone would agree with her on that.

No one wanted her out of that city more than her.

“Now I’d like to touch on that letter that you sent me, your Highness.”

Varian turned back to glare at her and Beve gritted her teeth, keeping her eyes firmly in the planner’s.

“What about it.”

“Well,” she replied, seeming to shrink under Beve’s eyes and get even smaller. She cleared her throat. “As you know, wedding ceremonies take five days in Stormwind and I’m not sure we’ll have the time for...”

“I’m not getting married if we don’t do it,” she cut her.

“Do what?” asked Varian, sounding pissed.

“Well...” breathed the wedding planner, and Beve _knew_ that it wouldn’t happen unless she directly explained it to him, so she turned to meet his icy eyes.

“There’s a ceremony. I suggested that we do it after leaving the Cathedral on the first day.”

“What is this ceremony about?”

“It’s about me and Alterac,” she said and he nodded slowly.

“What happens during that ceremony?”

“It won’t take long, you just have to stand there with Anduin while Rose and I do all the work.”

“Does it have to happen in the mountains?”

“Of course,” she replied, watching him sigh softly, doubt bubbling in her stomach.

She’d call it off if he said no. There was no way she’d marry him and be called the Queen of Alterac if it was to be like her brother, sitting on a throne without the power that came with it. She wouldn’t be another fake monarch.

“Listen,” he started, looking like a man who’s patience was running very thin.

“I can’t be a real Queen if we don’t do it,” she cut him, and watched as that had him raise an eyebrow.

“How so?”

“It doesn’t matter. Stormwind has its own custom and I get that, but so does Alterac, and I know that everyone is trying to forget that this is where I come from, that this is my _home_ , but I won’t let you take that away from me. So either we get married, with _my ceremony_ squeezed in between two balls or whatever it is you do for five days, or we’re simply not. I will join my people in Redridge and we’ll plan to leave as soon as possible. The choice is yours.”

He watched her without saying anything for a long while, face completely neutral, and she started wondering whether giving him an out like that — an ultimatum at that — had been the best idea.

“Okay,” he finally said after a _long_ time. “We’ll do it, in the first day, after the Cathedral.”

She thought for a fleeting moment of nodding as a thank you sign, before deciding against it and simply turning back to the wedding planner.

“Right,” murmured the woman before clapping excitedly, “let’s look at flowers now, shall we.”


	15. Chapter 15

Beve hadn’t really thought about Enugos in a while.

She had found him chained in the basement of a small shop, near the edge of Gilneas.

He looked like an elf, with pale skin and blue eyes, and had blinked at her with interest painted clear on his face.

“Oh, you must be Her Majesty Perenolde,” he had said as she had very slowly and cautiously approached.

“And you’re a blue dragon,” she had replied, feeling his raw power at the back of her throat even a few meters away from him. “What are you doing here?”

“Prisoner,” he had said, moving his wrists to make his chains clink together. “Has the city finally fallen?”

Beve had frowned, wondering what was happening here, exactly, for a blue dragon to be chained to a basement.

“Two days ago,” she had replied after a while. “Can I get you out of those chains without being murdered?”

“Of course,” he had smiled, “I’d never murder you, not considering who you are, and all that you have to accomplish.”

She had frowned harder, approaching carefully and taking his cuffs off with a simple spell.

“My husband has told me a lot about you,” he had added once she had freed him, before holding his hand out for her to shake, “I’m Enugos. Please, call me Enu.”

“Beve,” she had replied, shaking his hand, his grip as strong as hers.

They hadn’t really become friends, but they had talked a lot while Beve was cautiously exploring Gilneas, salvaging everything that could be and teleporting it to Alterac.

Enu was very cryptic. He kept telling her things about her that he should have never known and only brushed her questions off with a shrug and a “my husband is in the bronze dragonflight”.

In hindsight, she realized that he had actually told her that he would help her people. He had also told her things that she couldn’t imagine happening – things that couldn’t possibly be true, not now, not ever.

“I’m not the only one you’ll save,” he had said with a smile the last time they had talked. “You’ll come back, you know, covered in dragon blood but triumphant.”

“Which dragon’s blood?” she had asked but he had simply smiled, kissed her cheeks and transformed into his draconic form before flying away.

As she looked down at the stupid cake she was supposed to sample, she couldn’t help but think back on all of this, wondering.

Enu hadn’t said anything about a wedding, but he also hadn’t said anything about her thinking that everyone was dead for a few weeks.

Maybe dragons would be invited and cause trouble.

Maybe dragons would find her sometime before or after the wedding.

Maybe Enu had only said that because he knew that it would bother her.

“Please focus,” murmured Rose to her left, and Beve took a bite of the cake, slowly chewing on it, nodding along to whatever the wedding planner was saying.

The cake was too sugary – she hadn’t had any in at least twenty years and she had strangely not missed it at all, although Aldren’s face, who had _never_ had any, was priceless and so had everyone’s reaction been when he had announced that fact.

Actually, she thought as another piece of cake was put in front of her and everyone around the table – Rose, Aldren, Varian, Anduin, some girl with a gilnean accent — she didn’t even care if she had cake or not for her wedding.

Things weren’t progressing in Redridge, her fiancé and herself couldn’t look each other in the eye and she still hadn’t mustered the courage to talk to Aldren. She was pretty sure that Rose was getting so fed up with her bad mood that she was going to slap her at any moment, and somehow, trying out cakes seemed like the last straw and she could feel her calm composure slipping.

“As I said,” started the wedding planner, and Beve couldn’t remember what her name was, “this one is very light and creamy, perfect for the beginning of spring, a good reminder that this is an event to celebrate a new union, a new era for Stormwind and the whole Alliance and–”

The rest of her words were drowned out by the sound of Beve’s chair scrapping on the floor as she jumped to her feet, turned on her heels without a word and left the room altogether, ignoring Rose when she called out her name.

She needed air – real, _fresh_ air, not like the humid and heavy one she was breathing here.

She got out into the garden, leaning a shoulder against the same pillar Varian had pushed her against a few days before, and closed her eyes, sighing at length.

For ten minutes, she was blissfully left alone with her thoughts – and then Varian stepped right next to her and sighed.

“Get the threatening over with and then leave me alone,” she said without opening her eyes, hearing Varian snort as a reply.

“Anduin is the one threatening me with body harm if I so much as breath wrong in your direction.”

“Good,” she replied, opening her eyes to throw him a distrustful glance. “What do you want?”

“I care about wedding cakes about as much as you and you gave me the perfect excuse to get out of there.”

It was Beve’s turn to snort.

“Are we supposed to bond over our dislike of cake now?”

“Who knows,” he said with a shrugged shoulder. “We might not ever have to bond.”

“It might reflect badly on me if my husband cannot even look me in the eyes,” she replied, turning to look at him and meeting his gaze for once.

“Are you afraid of what people think of you now?”

“Not at all, but I’d like to not be attacked, and people thinking that you might retaliate if it happens would help.”

“I’ll think about it,” he replied, and Beve turned back to look out at the lush green garden, scowling slightly, her sour mood not improved the slightest.

Too many things were still hanging in the balance for her to finally start relaxing and make sense of everything that had happened to her those past few months, and for some unfathomable reason, all of this wedding planning was driving her crazy with stress.

It wasn’t like she even cared about the wedding in of itself – the only important part of this would be the ceremony, and she knew that Rose would never screw that up – yet there she was, with a weight in the stomach every time the subject came up – which meant practically every walking moment.

“If you want, you can stop participating in all the wedding arrangements,” said Varian after a long moment of silence.

He was staring off at the garden when Beve turned to shoot him a surprised look.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m not a monster, despite what you might believe or have heard.”

“Or both,” she said, and he sent her a quick, amused quirk of the lips.

“Or both,” he nodded. “You obviously hate it and would rather get it over with. We both agreed on the terms of the marriage, which was in my opinion the most important part of all this, and if you’d rather not get invested in the rest, I’m fine with that. Every second we spend away from each other before we _have_ to be in each other’s presence is a blessing to me.”

She nodded, not feeling insulted in the slightest since she thought exactly the same.

“Alright. I won’t be a part of all those meetings then.”

He nodded, turned to look down into her eyes, and didn’t say anything else for a second.

“If we ever get around to making that heir, I’d like to ask several uncomfortable questions about your family.”

Beve knew that he probably meant Aldren and her strange relationship with him, but she preferred to play dumb and just rolled her eyes.

“You might be too old to make any heir by the time we get married, considering how slow the process is,” she replied.

He chuckled – a strange, too low sound, like he didn’t do it often – and walked away while slowly shaking his head.

  


  


***

  


  


Beve couldn’t sleep that night, her thoughts running wildly around her head, going from pale hazel eyes to enigmatic dragons to blighted lands to daggers pressed against her throat and stomach, and back again to those two pairs of pale hazel eyes she could never forget.

She was running out of time – she couldn’t explain it but felt it deeply in her bones. She had to talk to Aldren, quickly, before the five days long wedding ended and she’d officially be Varian Wrynn’s wife.

It was clear that while being the Queen of Alterac in title, she wouldn’t ever leave Stormwind – no one would ever permit it, even after she took care of her brother and his followers. She had known this, had willingly made this sacrifice, if it meant building a future for her people, and had planned on naming Aldren as her consort, so someone she trusted could lead Alterac – so a _real_ heir could sit on the throne.

But he didn’t know that, yet, and she didn’t want him to think that she would name him consort just because he was her brother’s son – not when he was so much more than that, without even knowing.

It was starting to eat her up on the inside – she couldn’t stop thinking about all the missed opportunities since she had thought that he had died – and the fact that even _Varian Wrynn_ had picked up on this was only making things worse. She didn’t need people putting two and two together without first talking this out with Aldren and making sure that he didn’t hate her for ever after hearing her out.

She blinked up at the ceiling, another pair of pale hazel eyes coming to mind, and she closed her eyes, feeling a smile pull at her lips despite the bittersweet feeling swimming in her stomach, thinking back on being young and in love in a foreign Kingdom.

She remembered the blushing royal guard approaching her with stuttering words, having no idea of who she was and offering her a flower that had obviously been picked in the garden of the keep.

Even if she had known then, that this simple meeting with a guard would keep her up at night more than twenty years later, she would have still smiled to him and told him to get a better bouquet the next time because a simple flower wouldn’t do for someone of her rank.

She smiled broader as she remembered his spluttered answer, blush spreading down to his neck as he had tried to explain that he was sorry and he hadn’t know and he was _mortified_ , _please forgive me your Highness._

She had forgotten what her reply had been, but the next day he had presented her with a bouquet of fresh flowers, obviously picked by a florist, and she had known right then that she would never love someone as much as this nameless guard.


	16. Chapter 16

“This is ridiculous” sighed Aldren as Rose looked over her shoulder at the rest of the empty corner of the Keep’s library for the third time in as many minutes. “We’re not outlaws anymore, we should be able to meet and discuss where we please, without having to hide _here_!”

“Keep your voice down, will you,” replied Rose, before leaning across the table so she could whisper and have Beve hear her, “If we want to do this right, we need snow for the wedding.”

“I agree,” replied Beve, forcing herself not to smile when Aldren rolled his eyes exasperatedly at her tone matching Rose’s, before he was sighing, getting up and leaving.

“Good...” whispered Rose, “it’s better if what is said next stays between us.”

“Yes,” agreed Beve, unable to stop herself from looking over her shoulder too, just to make sure that the room was still completely empty. “We both know there’s only one place that can give us snow that will work, and we both know there’s only one person here that can get you there.”

Rose nodded and leaned even closer.

“When am I going?”

“I’ll make a portal the day before, directly to the altar. I’ll give you two hours, to gather everything that you’ll need, and then open up another portal so you can come back.”

“I’ll need three hours,” she replied, “just to be sure.”

“Alright,” said Beve. “Let’s just hope my brother is still too scared to go up there because I won’t be able to help you and you _will_ be behind enemies lines.”

“Don’t worry”, replied Rose, lightly patting Beve’s hand, “nothing can happen to me in those mountains, not while I still bear their blessings.”

Beve didn’t comment on how she hoped it was true or they were all finished, and smiled at Rose instead.

  


  


***

  


  


Anduin Wrynn seemed sweet, which was the exact reason Beve had done her best to avoid him – and as he sat down next to her on a secluded bench in the garden three weeks later, she couldn’t help but feel like this moment had been unavoidable.

“Your Highness,” he said.

“Your Highness,” she replied, trying not to scowl too much when he smiled slightly at the returned title and leaned back, getting comfortable.

“I feel like we haven’t talked to each other yet, which is problematic considering that you’re about to marry my father.”

“I don’t see how. It doesn’t make me your mother.”

“Mother in law,” he said, his smile getting bigger. “I also have to admit that I’d like to get to know you better for selfish reasons. Alterac, now that I know how big the kingdom has become, fascinates me. I’d like to know more about your culture and recent history.”

“There’s not a lot to know,” she replied, his comment so unexpected, it actually managed to destabilize her.

“I understand that the mountains mean a lot to you,” he still pressed, and this time Beve didn’t hide her scowl.

“It does,” she still replied, because after all, there was no harm in giving him just a little bit of information. “Alterac is more than our home.”

“Does this have to do with druidism?”

She chuckled. “No, we don’t have druids, we just...” she looked away for a moment, searching for words to explain it. “The mountains are our guides, they protect us, they provide us with everything that we need to survive, we come from them, and once we die, we go back to them.”

“So you worship it?”

“No, we just acknowledge its overwhelming power and make sure not to enrage it.”

Anduin frowned. “Enrage it? Does it react to things?”

“In a way.”

“How so?”

“Some people get out in the mountains and get lost forever after only three steps, while others can come and go and never get lost nor cold. The mountains give their blessings to a few lucky ones, and we all know not to try our luck making them angry. They have to be respected for what they are: more powerful than we will ever be.”

“Is that why there is a wedding ritual? Because you have to show the mountains?”

“No,” she smirked, “the ritual is because I’m not just any Alteraci getting married.”

It’s wasn’t a lie, in a way, and she knew that no one would tell the truth, to Anduin or anyone else. It was Alteraci business, and her people weren’t about to betray her like that – just like she was not naive enough to think that Anduin’s probing was innocent.

“I understand that your people don’t care much for anything except the Light,” she said before he could reply, and she watched something start to glimmer in his eyes.

“We do worship the Light,” he replied. “Don’t you?”

“We do, to a certain extend. We don’t have any places of worships, and most of the priests died a long time ago. All we have left of this worship are old books and memories.”

“I could take your people to the Cathedral, if they wish.”

“That’s very nice of you,” she replied, giving him an almost real smile, “but I’m not sure now is the right time.”

“I understand, but once all of this is over, once you and your people realize that you are all fully welcome into Stormwind and the Alliance, I really hope that I can meet them and talk to them about the Light, and they could tell me more about what are their feelings about it and any other subject they want. I want _all of you_ to feel at home here.”

She nodded, something strange happening at the back of her eyes – a sting, like tears were starting to build there, but it was impossible, she wouldn’t start to cry just because a too smart child was trying to play her by telling her that they were all finally welcomed, as if the last decades of ruthless war hadn’t happened, as if they hadn’t all tried to kill her only handful of days ago.

“You’re too kind, your Highness,” she replied after swallowing down the weight in her throat.

“Please,” he replied with a blinding smile, “call me Anduin.”


	17. Chapter 17

“I need you to tell me everything that you know about Anduin,” said Beve that night when she sneaked into Aldren’s bedroom and sat down next to him on his bed.

“Everything?” he asked, frowning and looking like he had been sleeping instead of waiting for her like she had asked him to.

“Yes, everything. This kid is trying to play me, but I don’t understand his motives.”

“Maybe to protect his father?” he replied, scratching at his cheek where the beginning of a beard was starting to appear. He had always been clean shaven, like Aliden, and she wondered whether the new style was a way to cut off ties with him or just out of laziness. “After all, I know I would try to play Varian Wrynn if I thought that it was possible, knowing that you’ll marry him.”

“That’s a nice sentiment, but that’s not it.”

“How do you know and how can you be sure if you think that I know Anduin more than you?”

“It’s just a gut feeling, trust me on this one. What do you know?”

“Well,” sighed Aldren, wiping at his eyes for a moment while Beve patiently waited for him. “He just came back from Pandaria, where he almost died at the hands of the warchief.”

“I know that.”

“Apparently, there was something with a black dragon,” he went on, and Beve’s heart skipped a beat at that last word – _dragon_ , like Enugos had said. “Considering his family’s history with black dragons, and the fact that it ended badly this time around too, I think it might be a reason for him to act strangely.”

“Hm,” she said, hoping her face didn’t let him see that she was more affected by what he had just said than she wanted him to know.

Apparently, he was more tired than she had thought, because he simply went on.

“He trained with some leader, I don’t remember the name, but a legendary priest, apparently. He’s very attached to the Light and his father is finally coming to terms with the fact that he’ll never be a warrior.”

Beve nodded without a word – wondering what would have happened to Aliden’s children had they all not been thrown into a world at war.

“What else?” asked Aldren, more to himself than her. “He’s very close with his father, constantly talks about him and tries to make him proud. He doesn’t realize that his father would probably burn down the whole world just for him,” – Beve smiled at this, because she understood this feeling more than anyone – “and that no matter what he does, no matter how his father pretends to feel, he’ll always be proud of him. Will always love him.”

Their eyes met at this, and Beve shivered, feeling like now was an excellent moment to speak up, to bring up a slightly similar subject concerning the two of them.

She kept her lips closed instead, looking into Aldren’s pale eyes with a weight at the bottom of her stomach.

“He’s lost his father once,” he said, looking down at his hands for a second before sending another look at Beve from under his lashes, “and I know the feeling. I lost almost my entire family, and he’s been very nice and helpful about it.”

“I’m glad,” she replied, voice only slightly wobbly.

“I just...” He frowned, seemingly struggling for words, and Beve realized that the conversation had slipped away from Anduin when he parted his lips. “I just can’t stop thinking about the fact that he killed all of them, without hesitating, that he even tried to kill Elysa, of all people, that we meant so little to him _and_...” His voice broke on the last word and Beve was suddenly reaching to hold his hands between hers, looking as deep into his eyes as she could, squeezing his fingers with hers, hoping that it would give him some comfort, because she was pretty sure that she would start to sob if he did, and then nothing would ever be said. “I know he’s never been perfect, but we were his _children_ , he was supposed to protect us, not kill us!”

Biting at the corner of his lower lip, he blinked at the tears in his eyes, on the brink of rolling down his cheeks, and sniffed.

“It’s stupid to dwell on it now that we’re away and soon getting ready to counter-attack, but I can’t stop myself from wondering if… if he waited to kill me last because of some stupid reason.”

“What reason?” Beve asked despite herself, heart hammering in her chest, sounding loud to her ears.

Aldren squeezed her fingers.

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied, voice coming out more as a whisper than anything else, “in fact nothing about what happened matters, except that I hope my mother is proud of me,” he said, his gaze becoming intent as he squeezed her fingers harder.

Beve’s heart skipped a beat, and she blinked at him, feeling like the floor was disappearing under her and she was falling, falling, falling, unable to breathe or scream, just here to let it happen.

She had never thought that this moment would feel like free falling.

“Beve,” he whispered, squeezing her fingers one more time, and she blinked again, tears rolling down her cheeks as she nodded and squeezed his fingers back.

“She is,” she replied, throat in a knot, voice weak from it, blood pulsing into her head hard and fast enough to make her dizzy. “She _is_ , she’s _so_ proud of you, she doesn’t have words for it.”

He nodded, his own tears starting to roll down his face as he slid closer to her on the bed.

“Then, if that’s the case,” he said, sounding like he was still trying to hold those tears back, “why hasn’t she… why...”

“It’s not of her own doing. She never wanted any of this to happen, _never_ wanted you to think that… that I didn’t...”

She stopped the second she realized that she had used the first person, opening her eyes wide in horror although it was clear that Aldren knew who they had been speaking about all along – clear that he hadn’t come to this realization only a few days ago, that this was something he had known for a while, and had waited to bring up, to spare her feelings or his, she wasn’t sure, but knowing that he had known about it was making her sick and even more dizzy, and she wasn’t sure she could do this, after all.

“I don’t blame you,” he murmured, letting go of her hands to gently wipe at her cheeks, and it was the last straw.

She burst into tears and let him take her into his arms, feeling his shoulders and chest shake with his own sobs while she clutched his shirt and closed her eyes, breaking into pieces right there and then but knowing that he would hold her together, no matter what, and that they would figure it out, like they always did.


	18. Chapter 18

Beve’s eyes were red and puffy when she woke up the next morning in Aldren’s bed, still wearing her dress from the day before and feeling exhausted deep into her soul.

She should have felt better from getting the biggest weight of her life off of her chest, but nothing was settled yet. Aldren might have known the truth, but he didn’t know the reasons yet, and Beve’s shortcomings could make him hate her, if not now, later, once he would sit on Alterac’s throne while she would falter away here in Stormwind, pretending not to hate everything about her new life.

Maybe it would be better. Light knew Aldren would probably live a healthier life without the Perenolde’s drama added to it.

Unfortunately, Beve was too selfish to let him go like that, and she got up and out of his room, determined to finish their conversation.

There was something she had gravely overlooked – something that had been in her mind and everybody’s mouth for the past month, something that she would have never forgotten about, had this conversation never happened.

“There you are!” exclaimed the wedding planner when Beve almost walked straight into her and Rose.

Rose looked like someone had just stepped on her foot and set fire to her hair while the other petite woman was beaming brightly.

“How are you feeling? Not too nervous, I hope.”

For a second, Beve frowned, not understanding what was happening, before it finally slapped her in the face.

_It was her wedding day._

  


  


***

  


  


  


Beve was staring at her reflection in the mirror with a frown while the two elves that she had seen what seemed to be a very long time ago were finishing up her hairdo.

She didn’t know how, but they had managed to make her look slightly younger with the make up, and while the hairdo was heavy and she was certain to get a headache from it after only a few hours, it _did_ make her look gorgeous.

It was a pity, really, to think that they had managed to make her look like that for a fake wedding.

Looking down at the satin white dress she was wearing, she couldn’t help but smirk. It was beautiful, as white as snow, with the back, shoulders and sleeves made entirely out of lace. It was almost too bad that there would undoubtedly be blood on it by the end of the day – not that anyone except Rose, Aldren and her knew.

“Don’t make that face,” said the male elf, stepping back to look at her hair, “you look amazing and you’re about to marry the most powerful man in the world.”

“He might also be the richest human to live,” added the female elf, stepping back too with a satisfied little smile.

“And he’s definitely the hottest one.”

“Lucky me,” deadpanned Beve, looking back at her reflection.

They had put little crystals all over her hair, along with a stupid flower crown – white petunias, of all things – and she very carefully reached up to feel one petal between her index and thumb, trying to remember the few lessons she’d had about the meaning of flowers, a _very_ long time ago.

“They’re the flowers of anger,” said the male as if he was reading her thoughts, smirking at her through the mirror, “but also say that the person giving them is being soothed by your presence. A very odd choice.”

“I think it’s fitting,” replied the female, squeezing Beve’s shoulders just long enough for her to tense, before she was turning around and calling some servants over.

The veil they all put on her head was reaching her lower back and had crystals too, and between this and her six foot long train, she had to admit that she finally looked like the royalty she actually was – and maybe it was the first time of her life that her entire physical appearance reflected that.

The wedding planner was waiting for her just outside the room, looking excited and stressed at the same time, and she squealed a little when her eyes feel on Beve.

“Oh, you are positively gorgeous, your Highness!” she exclaimed, “King Varian sure is a lucky man! He’s waiting for you right outside the Keep, by the way, you’ll both ride together to the Cathedral for the ceremony.”

Beve only gave a curt nod and followed her through hallways upon hallways, mind drifting back to Aldren and brutally going back to the present moment every time she met someone that stopped and stared – and complimented her, for the bravest ones.

Stepping outside, however, forced her to suddenly be very present in the moment as a crowd of what looked to be half of Stormwind started screaming the second she stepped on the stairs going down, to where a coach we waiting for her.

She swallowed her saliva, suddenly feeling very exposed, vulnerable and nervous as two dozens of guards came around her to escort her down the stairs.

The last time so many people had been around her screaming like that, she had been with her entire family getting escorted out of their ancestral home by Stromgarde soldiers ready to rip a throat out at the first sign of resistance.

She had lost her only sister that day and it was only thanks to Aliden and their brother Dimitri that she had kept going.

She swallowed again, a lump lodged right next to her Adam’s apple, and made sure to keep her head held high, eyes fixed on the white blue and gold coach. If she focused on it hard enough, she could ignore the fact that she was pretty sure someone in that crowd would throw something at her, starting a riot that would end with her death.

She blinked when she put a foot in front of her and found the paved ground instead of stairs, sending a quick nervous glance around her as a guard was opening the door to the coach for her, bowing slightly and offering his hand once it was done.

 _There you go_ , she thought as she held his hand and stepped into the coach, meeting Varian’s gray eyes and heart stopping for a second as the wedding planner was forcefully pushing her train inside, the king and future queen sitting opposite each other and just staring without a word.

“Those quel’dorei sure are talented,” he finally said as the coach started to move.

Beve didn’t reply. She had never been in a coach before and the soft rocking felt weird, but weirder than that was Varian.

His hair had been put up in a complicated hairdo too, accentuating the sharp planes of his face, and he was wearing a glimmering white blue and gold armor, obviously made for show instead of combat, and she had to admit, just this once and just to herself, that he was the most handsome man she had ever seen in her entire life.

To think that by the end of the day, she would be his wife – and would probably be in his bed too. She wasn’t in a hurry to get to this last part, but maybe…

Her eyes went up and down his body, before she settled on his eyes again.

“Is this a thinly veiled insult?” she asked.

He smirked and gently shook his head, eyes roaming over her body too.

“Not at all. You look nice, is what I meant.”

“Thank you,” she said, pausing for a long moment, wondering if she should be honest and return the compliment, the sound of the horses’ hooves hitting the pavement and excited screams from the streets the only sound reaching them. “You look nice too,” she finally said, and he gave her something that was too close to a real smile for her comfort.


End file.
